Terrence Henry reports on energy and the environment for StateImpact Texas. His radio, print and television work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, The Texas Tribune, The History Channel and other outlets.
He has previously worked at The Washington Post and The Atlantic. He earned a Bachelor’s Degree in International Relations from Brigham Young University.
One Houston firm's idea would give tar sands protesters another option for their commute.
Houston Landscape Architecture Firm Pushes Concept of Keystone XL Right-of-Way for Use as Bike Path
As a North American oil boom has taken off in the U.S. and Canada, so has the need to move that oil to refineries, many of which are in Texas. And the cheapest, most efficient way to do so is pipelines. But as those pipelines proliferate, so do issues over safety, like the spill that took over a neighborhood in Arkansas earlier this year. There are also conflicts over property rights, including several landowners in Texas who have fought companies who want to route private pipelines through their land.
Photo by Terrence Henry/StateImpact Texas
The Keystone XL pipeline under construction in East Texas in the Spring of 2013.
Those pipelines can cut a large swath through property, with an easement 50-feet wide. As you can see in the photo to the right of the Keystone XL pipeline under construction in Northeast Texas, it’s like building a road. And once the pipeline is in the ground, there’s not very much you can do with it. You can’t build any permanent structures on it, for instance.
Donna Nelson, chairperson of the Texas PUC, moved the commission a step closer today to a capacity market.
Public Utility Commission Signals Move to Increase Reliability, Which Could Raise Prices; Anderson Calls Idea “Corporate Welfare”
Meetings of the Texas Public Utility Commission are not a place you go to see fireworks. They usually deal with phone companies, transmission lines, and power generation. But it’s on that last subject where the conversation got a little spicy today.
The chairperson of the commission, Donna Nelson, unexpectedly brought up a proposal that could have wide implications for the deregulated power market in Texas, and could also raise power bills for consumers. Nelson wanted to move the state’s reserve margin — the amount of extra power available at times of peak demand — from its current state of a goal to something that is mandatory. Commissioner Ken Anderson was taken aback.
“I would’ve liked some advance notice, even a memo the day before,” Anderson said. “Saying, I plan to bring this up. Cause this is big.”
“Commissioner Anderson,” Nelson interrupted, “you have handed memos to me at 8 o’clock in the morning as I walk in, right before an open meeting.”
“Not on something this big!” Anderson retorted.
The two commissioners have been deadlocked for over a year on this issue.
At the center of the debate is an idea that would pay power generators in Texas not just for the electricity they produce, but also just for being around. It’s known as a capacity market. There’s a lot of nitty gritty here, but it boils down to one question: Will the state of Texas have enough power for its growing population and potentially hotter summers?
The Chevrolet Volt charges at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2011
The rise of electric cars in Texas has brought up a concerning scenario: What if too many cars charge their batteries at the wrong time, potentially overloading the Texas grid? If, say, thousands of cars all plug in during a hot Texas summer weekday afternoon, when power supplies are already tight, would it possibly be enough to push those slim margins past the edge?
A new analysis suggest there may not be much to worry about after all.
2011 was the driest year in Texas’ recorded history — crops failed, herds were sold off and lakes and reservoirs literally went dry. Some communities, like Spicewood Beach in the Hill Country or Robert Lee in West Texas, had to scramble to find new water supplies. And in the middle of this catastrophic drought, the state of Texas had one vocal strategy: Pray for rain. Texas Governor Rick Perry issued a proclamation that year asking Texans to pray for rain for three days.
Now, a few dry years and billions of dollars in drought losses later, the state has decided it needs a more consistent strategy to secure water. “We can’t make it rain,” Perry said at a recent event. “But we can take measures to extend our existing water supply and work to develop new supplies.” Perry was out stumping in support of Proposition 6, a state constitutional amendment on the ballot this year.
“What Prop 6 does is put in place 2 billion dollars so the state can lend money to utilities and cities that are seeking to do either conservation projects or new water supply projects,” says Laura Huffman, Texas state director for the Nature Conservancy.
That $2 billion would come from the state’s surpluses, known as the Rainy Day Fund, to create a fund for new water projects. It’s drawn widespread, bipartisan support, from businesses to environmental groups. Continue Reading →
New numbers from the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that energy-related carbon emissions continue to fall in the country, down nearly four percent last year. “The 2012 downturn means that emissions are at their lowest level since 1994 and over 12 percent below the recent 2007 peak,” the EIA reports.
Those declines have occurred in 5 out of the last 7 years, even last year as the economy began to recover.
So what’s behind the change? The EIA credits several factors: increased energy efficiency (i.e. appliances that use less power), warmer weather (meaning less heating for homes), more efficient vehicles, and more natural gas in the power sector instead of coal. (Renewable energy actually declined last year, due to less hydro power being used.)
While the declines are positive news, they likely aren’t enough to reverse an emissions trend that has lead to climate change across the planet. And what’s happening here in the U.S. isn’t true for growing countries like India and China, where emissions are growing. Continue Reading →
Utility scams are a common form of fraud and identity theft.
Sometimes it’s a knock on the door, with someone telling you they need to check your electrical wiring. Perhaps you’ve gotten a phone call threatening to cut off your power if you don’t pay your electric bill immediately over the phone by credit card or within a half hour by wire transfer. Or maybe it’s someone on the phone calling to offer to help you pay your electric bill, thanks to a federal program. Most likely all of these are instances of fraud — criminals attempting to extort you or steal your identity.
“Scams are constantly being generated, not just utility scams,” says Jarrod Wise with the Better Business Bureau‘s Austin office. “Scammers will find any kind of way to try to get your personal information,” he says, with the intention of stealing your identity.
Sometimes the scams will use intimidation and fear to defraud consumers, like threatening to cut off your power. Wise says this is a “red flag.” “I mean, you have to say, no one [from a power company] is going to demand to do this right away, no one is going to demand money up front, and your power isn’t going to be turned off. That’s just not going to happen.” Continue Reading →
The U.S. is set to be the number one producer of oil and gas this year.
The current domestic drilling boom has brought plenty of jobs, traffic and concerns about pollution and sustainability. It’s also put the U.S. in a position that was unimaginable a decade ago: this year, the U.S. will be the number one producer of oil and gas, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA).
“Since 2008, U.S. petroleum production has increased 7 quadrillion Btu, with dramatic growth in Texas and North Dakota. Natural gas production has increased by 3 quadrillion Btu over the same period, with much of this growth coming from the eastern United States,” the EIA says in an analysis today. Production has also been up for Russia and Saudi Arabia, but not nearly the same amount. The U.S. and Russia had been neck and neck for the past few years; this year, the U.S. struck a clear lead in fossil fuel production.
The increase in domestic production is due largely in part to the use of drilling techniques like hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” and horizontal drilling. Those methods — largely proven viable in Texas — have allowed large domestic deposits of oil and gas to be reached. Texas has taken the lead in that domestic production, and is projected to continue to do so.
Millions of them have been installed in homes across Texas, but not everyone is happy about them. Smart meters, which allow allow utilities to respond to outages faster and help utilities and consumers monitor their energy use, have been deployed across much of the state at the urging of the state’s Public Utility Commission (PUC). By replacing old analog meters, the argument goes, grid efficiency is improved and utilities are saved a monthly trip to each home to record usage.
But now that the smart meters are making their way to smaller towns like Alpine in Far West Texas, more opposition is occurring. As Natalie Pattillo reports for Marfa Public Radio today, that opposition is coming from people concerned about “health risks from radioactive-frequency signals, a rise in electric bills, and consumer anxieties about the security of their information.” Some of the opposition has come from Tea Party groups and the Alex Jones InfoWars crowd. In at least one instance, a Texas town has come up with rules to allow people to refuse the meters: the town of Brady successfully passed a smart meter opt-out plan earlier this year.
After some of the opposition became vocal over the last few years, the Public Utility Commission has approved a plan that will allow Texans across the state to opt-out of the meters. But it will come at a price.
“The customers who opts-out will have to pay the costs that will be incurred to be able to do that,” says PUC Commissioner Kenneth Anderson. “We also will be requiring those customers to acknowledge in writing that they understand they will be losing some benefits from not having the smart meters.”
The PUC says claims of health risks from smart meters are “unwarranted.”
Texas isn’t known for having a warm relationship with the federal government. A recent petition to the White House calling for Texas to secede garnered more than 100,000 signatures. The leading Republican candidate for Governor, state Attorney General Greg Abbott, has openly bragged about how much he loves suing the Obama administration. So Texans who disdain the federal government may be feeling a bit of schadenfreude today due to the federal government shutdown. But they could be missing out on some Texas treasures as a result.
There are several federal outposts in Texas, in the form of National Parks, Forests and Monuments. And as of today you’ll find yourself out of luck if you want to collect pine cones in Davy Crockett National Forest or Instagram a sunset at Big Bend National Park. All of them are closed because of the shutdown.
Here are thirteen national parks and seven national forests and grasslands closed as of today, with a description of each from their respective National Park websites: Continue Reading →
French Erwann Le Rouzic, captain of Planetsolar catamaran, the first boat around the world with solar energy, walks over the photovoltaic panel during his 581st day of sailing around the world, in the Mediterranean Sea near Corsica on May 1, 2012 .
While Texas leads the nation in the production of oil, natural gas and wind energy, the sunny state is lagging a little in the solar energy race. Texas comes seventh in installed solar, but ranks first in potential for solar energy. Several new developments in the state’s energy industry may begin to change that.
If you’re a customer in the deregulated parts of Texas’ energy market (i.e. most of the state, save Austin, El Paso, San Antonio, and some parts of the Panhandle), you now have the option to to power your home 100% from the sun. SolarSPARC is a new program from a retail electric provider — essentially the cable or phone companies of the electricity world in Texas — that is offering, for the first time, a 100% solar power option for customers.
“This really opens up solar to the masses,” says Shay Ohrel, product innovation manager for Green Mountain Energy in Austin, which has started the program. “It allows people to receive both the environmental and financial benefits of solar.”
Solar continues to get cheaper, and installations are growing in the country. While Texas doesn’t have much of it yet, cities like Austin and San Antonio are moving forward with long-term projects to build large solar farms. An option like Solar Spark allows residential consumers outside of those cities to choose solar without having to install panels on their own roof. Continue Reading →
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Texas isn’t known for having a warm relationship with the federal government. A recent petition to the White House calling for Texas to secede 