While we’ve taken to calling it the Texas drought, it’s important to remember that the drought knows no borders. In Mexico, some 600,000 households “suffered property damage or crop losses due to an unusual combination of floods, drought and freezing weather in 2011,” according to the Associated Press.
The agency spoke with Heriberto Felix Guerra, Mexico’s social development secretary. He told them that “the drought has been so bad that about 2.6 million people in about 1,650 villages and towns in northern Mexico do not even have drinking water.” His agency has had to truck in water to those people.
Guerra blamed the extreme temperatures and weather on climate change, the Associated Press says, “and predicted that such natural disasters will become worse in coming years.”
The 380-acre Webberville Solar Farm outside of Austin will power 5,000 homes.
Earthquakes, fracking and solar power are all hot topics on StateImpact Texas these days. In case you missed any of them, here are our top five stories published in the last week:
A Look to the Future at Texas’ Largest Solar Farm:Â Politicians, green energy advocates and industry representatives are hoping a new solar farm will showcase the promise of renewable energy after a turbulent year for the solar industry.
The 380 acre Webberville Solar Farm outside of Austin will power 5000 homes.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony Friday marked the official opening of the Webberville Solar Farm, an array of 127,000 solar panels set to provide enough electricity to power 5,000 homes in the Austin area. The farm will be the largest of its kind in Texas, and is the largest solar project of any public power utility in the United States, according to Austin Energy CEO Larry Weiss.
Politicians, green energy advocates and industry representatives were on hand, hoping the event would showcase the promise of renewable energy after a turbulent year for the solar industry. Continue Reading →
Pump jack in Pierce Junction oilfield south of downtown Houston
The Texas Comptroller’s office is adding auditors to increase scrutiny of tax breaks claimed by drilling operations.
“We are currently re-deploying resources and hiring auditors so that five auditors will work on oil and gas audits,” said Comptroller spokesperson R.J. DeSilva in an email to StateImpact Texas.
And last night in Oklahoma, a fracking well caught fire. Here’s the video from the website Drilling Ahead:
A report from the website says the rig, owned by Nomac, a subsidiary of the fracking giant Chesapeake, “drilled into a shallow gas pocket soon after spudding in at a drilling depth of 900′ northwest of Sweetwater, Oklahoma” around 6 p.m. on January 5. There are no reported injuries. Continue Reading →
Photo Courtesy of Jim Gossen, Louisiana Foods - Global Seafood Source
An Asian Tiger Prawn caught last September near Little Lake in Larose, LA
The Asian Tiger Prawn can grow over a foot long. It’s a species from the Western Pacific Ocean that first showed up off the coast of Alabama in 2006, when a single, solitary prawn was reported. If the story ended there, we wouldn’t have much to talk about.
But it doesn’t.
“The next year in 2007, you had some pop up in Louisiana just one or two, in 2008, three or four, [and in] 2009 a couple,” Leslie Hartman, the Matagorda Bay Ecosystem leader with Texas Parks and Wildlife, told Stateimpact Texas.
Do you ever enjoy the cool breezes on the beaches of the Gulf Coast? Well, those winds could one day be cooling you down in your own home.
A few years from now, you might stand on the shore and see miles and miles of massive three-pointed stars rotating along the surface of the sea. They’re offshore wind turbines, and hundreds of them may one day dot the horizon.
Mention “offshore wind” to Mark Leyland, and he becomes almost wistful. “Ahh, offshore wind,” the Senior Vice President for Wind Energy Projects at Baryonyx says. “Even though a lot of people in Texas have seen onshore wind, I always say that offshore wind and onshore wind are only similar in one respect: they [both] have the word “wind” in their title.”
Even though he grew up in Britain, or as he likes to call it, “East Texas,” Leyland has spent the last few decades building offshore oil rigs in the gulf. He now wants to bring that drilling expertise to wind, and so his company has leased 67,000 acres of land off the coast of Texas to build hundreds of giant wind turbines. Continue Reading →
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Government forecasters today reported that the drought will not be over before Spring.
La Niña, the dry weather pattern that has been in part responsible for the drought this past year, is going to stick around a little longer, say scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That means “drier-than-average” conditions throughout the South and Texas.
La Niña is a weather pattern where the surface temperatures are cooler in the Pacific, which creates drier, warmer weather in the southern U.S. (You may also know her counterpart, El Niño, which generally has the opposite effect.) La Niña sticks around for a year, sometimes longer, and tends to return once every few years. The last La Niña occurred in 1995.
But a majority of the NOAA models of La Niña predict that it will dissipate from March to May. Continue Reading →
Tuesday we told you about the man who paid for (and charges) his Chevy Volt with solar panels on the roof of his house. Today comes news he’s going to have to do with a loaner for a little while.
In what the Associated Press is calling a “move similar to a recall,” General Motors is going to ask owners of the plug-in vehicle to bring their cars in, so that the casing around the battery can be strengthened.
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