Dave Fehling is the Houston-based broadcast reporter for StateImpact. Before joining StateImpact Texas, Dave reported and anchored at KHOU-TV in Houston. He also worked as a staff correspondent for CBS News from 1994-1998. He now lectures on journalism at the University of Houston.
FM 3278 crosses the Trinity River just downstream from the Lake Livingston Dam
Once called the “River of Death” because it was so polluted with sewage and waste from slaughterhouses, the Trinity River has defied the great drought and helped maintain one of Houston’s critical supplies of water. And much of the credit goes to what a century ago made the river so polluted: the wastewater from Dallas-Fort Worth.
The Trinity flows past Dallas and goes south 200 miles to Lake Livingston. Even after the long summer of record drought and heat,
Map courtesy TRA
Click on the image above to trace the Trinity River Basin's route.
thousands of gallons of water still cascade every second down the lake’s spillway. From there, the flow again takes the form of a river and 80 miles later, the Trinity ends at Trinity Bay on the Gulf of Mexico.
Electricity transformer station in downtown Houston
Even in Texas, where it may seem the sky’s the limit for making fortunes in the energy business, there are rules. Or at least, there are rules when it comes to the price of one form of energy: electricity.
In this case, there is the rule called a “price cap” and it’s imposed by state regulators on the wholesale price of electricity (what retail providers pay for the electricity they then sell to you). Now, the state’s Public Utility Commission (PUC) may raise the cap, letting big power generating companies make more money during times of enormous demand. Continue Reading →
One member of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, concerned that electricity generators need more incentives to build additional power plants, suggested eliminating the cap on prices charged during peak times.
Texas PUC
PUC commissioner Kenneth Anderson
“I’m not prejudging it. I’ve got no particular problem raising the system wide offer cap, or eliminating the cap or adjusting the cap on peak or net margin,” said PUC commissioner Kenneth Anderson at the commission’s meeting Thursday in Austin.
The PUC has been concerned over recent forecasts that the power grid would be struggling to keep up with demand if this coming summer is as hot as 2011. The current price cap is $3000 per megawatt hour for the wholesale electricity market. The PUC has discussed raising the cap, but eliminating it?
“That’s a pretty big opening,” said PUC spokesperson Terry Hadley. He told StateImpact Texas that determining how much the cap will be raised, if at all, will be decided with ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) which is the marketplace for distributing electricity in the state.
Galveston seawall (fore) stopped erosion that otherwise moved coastline hundreds of feet inland (back)
To some researchers, what’s happening to the sea level on the Texas Gulf Coast is a clear and present danger. But they worry the word is not getting out, or that the State of Texas is diluting it.
“It’s happening right now, the evidence is clear all around the region,” said David Yoskowitz of the rise in the sea level. Yoskowitz is an economist with the Harte Research Institute at Texas A&M Corpus Christi. Continue Reading →
In a large, two story home in a wooded subdivision near where for years the Texas oil industry has drilled for black gold, three women have gathered around the kitchen table.
Dave Fehling/StateImpact Texas
Karen Darcy (left) and Rebecca Kaiser
“No one could believe what was happening,” said Rebecca Kaiser, whose two young children played upstairs.
She’s talking about a day some ten months earlier when she and carloads of her fellow Montgomery County residents angrily left a meeting of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ).
“It’ll be horrible,” Hoagland said of the project, which will inject toxic waste into old oil wells near her town of Conroe. She fears it’ll not only threaten the purity of the well water she drinks but fill the road out in front of her house with tanker trucks bringing the waste in from petrochemical plants outside Houston. Continue Reading →
In Houston, where the business boosters count 3,600 local companies doing energy-related work, the title “World’s Energy Capital” is taken very seriously. And not just because of pride or profit.
“If you begin to lose the concentration in Houston as the Energy Capital, you start getting into, in my opinion, national security issues,” said Lane Sloan,a former long-time top executive with Shell. Continue Reading →
Mounds of coal at the Coleto Creek power plant in Fannin, Texas
When it comes to using coal to make electricity in Texas, groups opposed to what they call “dirty coal” say they almost always lose when they try to convince state regulators to deny proposed plants permission to operate. But while they’ve lost some battles, are they actually winning the war? Continue Reading →
School's Out: Kids at the End of The Day at Kruse Elementary in Pasadena, Texas
The way one lawyer working for the Harris County government sees it, his office is enforcing pollution laws because the state of Texas isn’t.
“Sadly, the history of the State of Texas in protecting people, especially people here on the Gulf Coast from environmental contamination, is pitiful,” said Terry O’Rourke, First Assistant Harris County Attorney. “It is a history of neglect.”
Green industries promise new jobs but Texas is still dominated by traditional energy.
Federal funds would be better spent on traditional jobs rather than those in “green energy” businesses, according to economists with the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology.
“We looked as objectively as we could,” said Michelle Foss, Chief Energy Economist with the Bureau. “And for quite a long time, for the foreseeable future, (Texas) would be losing more than gaining from any policy that caused a diversion of investment away from our traditional energy businesses and towards green energy businesses.”
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