The Texas state legislature meets next week for another session, and there’s a sense that this time around, serious measures will be taken to fund water projects. Texas is, after all, an ever-growing state in the midst of an extended dry spell.
Hopes that the lege will act to fund water projects are high in West Texas towns like Spur, where Texas Tribune reporters Alana Rocha and Justin Dehn visited recently. But even if lawmakers do act, some in Spur aren’t convinced it will be enough to make a real difference for small Texas towns like theirs. You can watch their video report above.
Photo courtesy of dshortey via Flickr's Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dshortey/
The Qudrantid Meteor Shower will be visible early Thursday Morning before sunrise.
Update: If you’re reading these words the peak of the Quadrantid Meteor Shower has passed. But if you missed it, you can check out this slideshow or check out the video embedded below the jump.
Earlier: If you didn’t see any fireworks on New Year’s Eve, you might want to look to the skies tonight (well, technically very early tomorrow). That’s when the Quadrantid Meteor Shower will reach its peek visibility for the year.
Between 3 a.m. and sunrise Thursday morning, as many as 120 meteors an hour fall to earth in the shower. That could make for quite a show, but there’s a problem for people who want to watch in Texas. Actually, there are two of them.
A wind turbine rises above field in Burgenland near the Austrian-Slovakian border
Just a week after Texas hit another record for wind power generation, the wind industry and the green energy sector are breathing a huge sigh of relief today after Congress extended a tax credit that was set to expire.
The Renewable Electricity Production Tax Credit (PTC) has been around since 1992, and gives producers of wind, geothermal and some biomass projects a credit for each kilowatt hour of energy they make during their first ten years of operation. The one-year extension of the credit is expected to cost $12.1 billion over ten years.
As Politico reports, the extension of the credit actually improves it for the wind industry, as it “changes the language to allow any project that has begun construction by [the end of the year] to qualify for the PTC, rather than just projects operational by the deadline.” This makes the credit more effective this year, as it typically takes between 18 to 24 months to develop a new wind farm, according to the American Wind Energy Association.Continue Reading →
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