Photo Courtesy of Slowek Puklo via Flikr http://www.flickr.com/photos/spuklo/
Storms often cause trees to fall on power lines, sometimes bringing blackouts to thousands.
Correction: The original version of this story said the PUC Meeting was Wednesday. It isThursday Dec. 13.
It’s natural to feel powerless when you’re stuck at home during a torrential Texas thunderstorm. It’s even worse if you’re literally without power. All it takes is one tree branch falling onto an electrical wire to cut your precious access to the grid.
But there’s little regulation in Texas aimed at keeping branches out of the way of power lines. Continue Reading →
Wind turbines in West Texas help produce record amounts of electricity for the state.
The federal tax credit that helped make Texas the leader in wind power expires at the end of year. Some people in the wind energy industry seem resigned to the possibility that even if Congress renews the credit, the days of such breaks are nearing an end.
At the American Wind Energy Association conference held last week in Houston, there was optimism that President Obama’s reelection improved the odds that Congress will extend the production tax credit.
“But few believe the production tax credit will be in existence in 2015,” said Steve Krebs, the vice president of OwnEnergy, who was part of a panel discussion.
Dr. Charles "Chip" Groat says he wants to put the fracking study controversy behind him.
One University of Texas at Austin professor has retired and another has resigned his position as head of UT’s Energy Institute, the school announced Thursday after the release of a scathing review of a study on fracking that has become mired in controversy.
The man at the center of the storm for sitting on the board of a drilling company the entire time, Dr. Charles “Chip” Groat, has declined a request for an interview, but has talked to us about his take on the matter in a series of emails over the last 24 hours. “While I admit that even though my reasons for not disclosing my industry connection were valid in terms of connection to the report results,” Groat writes, “I should have made a disclosure.”
In his most recent email to us, Groat writes, “I don’t have anything further to discuss regarding my role in the project.”
Under an Open Records Request, we have obtained Groat’s letter of retirement dated November 21, which you can read in full below. In it, Groat makes no mention of the controversy, instead he writes of his new position as head of the not-for-profit Water Institute of the Gulf in Louisiana, where he and his wife are moving.
In the Texas Hill Country, one landfill’s trash powers homes
New Braunfels is best known for its clear-running rivers, the Guadalupe and the Comal seen here behind a city waste container.
For over two decades, trash from New Braunfels headed to the Mesquite Creek Landfill on the edge of town.
Garbage rich in organic matter arrives by the ton.
Compacted by heavy equipment, each “cell” of trash covers some 15 acres and will eventually be covered with soil.
A gas recovery system is made up of 2.5 miles of pipe and 67 gas extraction wells.
Paul Pabor is Vice President of Renewable Energy for the site’s operator, Waste Management, a Houston-based nationwide disposal giant.
From the landfill, the methane gas is piped to a cement-block building across the road.
Methane powers two huge engines that produce electricity.
Each engine cranks out about 1500 kilowatts
The electricity is then sent to the electric grid, enough to power up to 1800 homes in New Braunfels.
Landfills keep on producing methane for decades. This is the entrance to a city landfill in Houston and though closed in 1970, it’s listed by the US EPA as a potential project to produce methane for nearby industries.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), there are 27 landfills in Texas that are producing enough methane gas to make electricity or provide fuel to power industrial equipment. The agency says another 57 landfills are candidates for such projects.
“Texas is one of the few remaining states with a large number of landfills that don’t already have landfill gas energy projects and may have the potential to support them,” the EPA wrote in a lengthy statement emailed to StateImpact Texas.
Edith Williams lives with her dog in an apartment in Round Rock. She says she depends on low income assistance from the System Benefit Fund to make ends meet.
“Fiscal transparency” and “cost cutting” are just a few of the buzzwords to watch for as state lawmakers gather in Austin next January for the 83rd Texas legislature.  But with all that talk, you might be surprised to learn that there’s a pile of nearly one billion dollars that’s been growing in a state fund for years. And it’s not being used for its intended purpose.
Meet the System Benefit Fund, a pot of 850 million dollars overseen by the Public Utility Commission of Texas. You might already be acquainted with the fund. After all, if you’ve ever paid a bill to a private electric company in Texas, you’ve paid fees into it.
Now meet Miss Edith Williams.
Williams is a 69 year old retired housekeeper. She and her dog live in an apartment in Round Rock, Texas. And she’s one of the hundreds of thousands of people who receive money from the System Benefit Fund to help pay her utility bill. In fact, the day I visited her, she said that I may have found her sitting in the dark if it weren’t for the fund. Continue Reading →
The electricity industry and its regulators in Texas have consistently touted the state’s competitive retail market as good for consumers. But price data indicate many of those customers are failing to take advantage of the lowest rates.
Courtesy Texas PUC
Donna Nelson chairs the PUC
In speeches and at public hearings, Donna Nelson, chairman of the Public Utility Commission (PUC), has contended that the areas of Texas where electricity is sold by a variety of retailers — as opposed to just one utility company as in San Antonio and Austin — is a system that benefits consumers.
“I think what the rates now show us … is that competitive markets work,” Nelson said at a commission meeting earlier this year.
Similarly, in 2011, Nelson told the Gulf Coast Power Association, an industry group, that while critics may “look for any way to describe Texas’s restructured market as a failure,” Texas retail electric providers had rates well below the national average according to an example she cited. Continue Reading →
Texas is awash in green energy potential. Problem is, we don't have anywhere to store the renewable energy we produce.
Texas may be rich in fossil fuels like oil and gas, but it’s also awash in clean, renewable energy.
Well, at least it could be. With the most renewable energy potential in the United States, Texas is a formidable candidate to up their renewable energy usage. Wind power now supplies 8 percent of energy to the grid in Texas and it’s cheaper than ever. However, the Energy Institute’s Raymond Orbach at the University of Texas at Austin says there’s still one major roadblock. “If someone could lick the storage problem,” Orbach says, “we would really have a remarkable resource.”
The ‘storage problem’ boils down to how energy works. “You can’t turn the sun off, and you can’t tell the wind to blow,” says Orbach. It’s simply unreliable.And you have to use the energy while it’s there. Right now turbine energy created from early afternoon winds has to be used immediately, in the early afternoon. But the demand for energy peaks later in the afternoon during the hot Texas summers, when the winds have died down. Solar could fill that gap, but efforts to incentivize it’s construction haven’t gone anywhere yet in Texas, and there’s always the question of what happens when a bunch of clouds pass over.
So creating something that can store and save renewable energy like wind and solar for later would change the game entirely. Continue Reading →
Receding waters have ravaged communities in the Highland Lakes.
Update: The LCRA Board approved the emergency plan with some last-minute tweaks on Wednesday. Read the details here.
Original Story: The LCRA’s plan for emergency drought relief revealed Monday at a board meeting in Fredricksberg has left many upstream interests with a bad taste in their mouths.
The plan is itself a change from an earlier LCRA staff recommendation to not seek drought relief this year. That reversal had buoyed hopes in many Central Texas communities that water would stay in the Highland Lakes as long as they sat depleted from last year’s record drought. But as details of the plan emerged, it became clear that Highland Lake interests had not gotten the plan they wanted.
The lakes are currently only 43 percent full. Under the staff plan unveiled Tuesday, around 145,000 acre feet of water will be released to rice farmers downstream on January 1, as long as the lakes sit around 38 percent full on January first. A second water release could be approved in March if water levels remain at or above that 38 percent level.
Wildlife officer Jim Yetter led a criminal investigation of a site in Jefferson County
Landfarms are privately-owned but state-regulated fields where “low toxicity waste” is thinly spread then tilled into the soil. The tainted waste is supposed to degrade naturally.
In Texas, landfarms are used to dispose of the drilling fluid used to reduce friction as the drill chews through thousands of feet of rock and sand.
But a criminal case involving the operation of a landfarm near Beaumont raises questions about how the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) is enforcing the state’s pollution laws. Continue Reading →
Mark Stimak says working in his BBQ trailor during the summer of 2011 was unbearable. This past summer was pretty hot too.
It’s the lunch rush on a warm November afternoon at the Hog Wild BBQÂ food trailer in Austin, and owner Mark Stimak says business is good. This time last year, he remembers, he was still recovering from the dry, hot summer. A summer that, in Austin, brought 90 days of triple-digit heat.
“It was just unbearable, I was always asking myself, ‘Why am I doing this business?'” he tells StateImpact Texas. “As a matter of fact, trailer food sales were way down that summer because people did not want to come out and sit outside.”
Compared to that experience, Stimak says working the barbecue pit this year was a cake walk. Not that this summer was particularly cool.
“Still, it was ridiculously hot,” he says. “We hit a hundred degrees a couple dozen times, I think.”
In fact, Austin hit triple digits 35 times this year. The average for the city is 13 times. And Austin was not unique. As Texans across the state comforted each other by observing ‘At least it’s not as bad as last year,’ 2012 was shaping up to be another one for the record books.
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