We’re excited to announce today that our lead radio station, KUT Austin, has received a National Edward R. Murrow Award for continuing coverage of the Texas drought. One of our StateImpact Texas reports on how hunters have fared during the drought is part of the award. So a shout-out is in order to our own Mose Buchele for that story, and another to StateImpact Texas editor Emily Donahue for her piece on a rancher going hungry to keep her horses fed during the drought. And congrats to all our colleagues at KUT.
You can listen to all of the radio reports that won the award for best ‘Audio Continuing Coverage’ in the embedded player above.
And it goes without saying that such stories wouldn’t exist in the first place without you, our readers and listeners, especially the many of you that have shared your stories of the drought with us.
Texas has a Revolving Door law but critics say it's ineffective
There’s a flow of talent leaving Texas environmental regulation agencies, often for better-paying jobs in the private sector. In some cases, the former state employees are hired by the very companies they used to regulate.
The revolving door is obvious by looking at resumes posted on job-hunting websites by people whose experience includes stints at the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) or at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), the big state agencies that regulate refineries, oil and gas drilling, pipelines and power plants.
Rows of tomatoes at the new Village Farms greenhouse in Monahans.
A few weeks ago we reported on the grand opening of a massive 15-acre greenhouse growing tomatoes in the Texas desert. The innovative facility from Village Farms uses little water, lots of diffused light and no soil. It also works by keeping Mother Nature (in the form of pests, floods and drought) out.
But sometimes, she’ll just fight her way back in.
Three Village Farms tomato greenhouses in Marfa suffered major damage during an extreme hailstorm on the night of May 31st. According to the company, about 82 acres of greenhouses were affected. Many of the glass windows that form the roofs were shattered.
“It’s a mess. Nothing’s happened like this before,” says Doug Kling, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer with Village Farms. “Occasionally you lose some glass to a bad storm. But nothing like this. The good news is, nobody was hurt.”
Kling says the greenhouse is closed temporarily and the company is calculating how much damage was done. Continue Reading →
A street is flooded on Coney Island after Hurricane Irene hit, in New York, August 28, 2011.
In the world of water, all things are connected. That’s what a recent study seems to say about the effects of increasing groundwater consumption on the Earth’s sea levels.
Dr. Yoshihide Wada, a hydrologist at Utretcht University in the Netherlands, claims in the study that groundwater taken out of the earth will likely find its way back to the ocean, causing sea levels to rise further. His team of Dutch scientists modeled current groundwater extraction trends, economic growth, development projections, climate change, and aquifer recharge rates around the world to estimate the impact of harvested groundwater.
The findings of the study are intriguing; particularly when groundwater extraction issues have become so significant in the Texas Panhandle.
Wada and his colleagues have discovered that groundwater depletion is adding approximately 0.6 millimeters per year to the sea level. By 2050, the combined effects of population growth, economic development, and higher irrigation needs may increase this rate to 0.82 millimeters per year. Continue Reading →
The National Guard's C-130s help deal with major emergencies in Texas and along the Gulf Coast.
They were part of the wildfire-fighting force that helped push back Texas’ worst year of fires in history, and now they may be leaving the state’s armada.
The U.S. Air Force wants to move eight C-130s from Fort Worth to Montana. But Texas feels differently.
As Era Sundar of StateImpact Texas lead station KUT reports, some state officials are criticizing the Air Force’s plans. They say it could hamper Texas’ ability to fight wildfires like the ones in Bastrop and West Texas last year.
But an Air Force spokesperson told KUT that the military has budget cuts to deal with and “has to distribute its diminishing airlift capabilities more evenly.” The Air Force says Montana has a shortage of the planes, but there would still be C-130s available to Texas from bases in Arkansas and Mississippi. Continue Reading →
Al Armendariz was the regional administrator for the EPA. He resigned after comments he made about enforcement came to light.
Earlier this week, Al Aremendariz was back in the news. The former Region 6 administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had been scheduled to appear at a House subcommittee hearing on the EPA, but canceled at the last minute. Texas regulators and other energy industry figures spent much of the hearing blasting him and the EPA anyway.
Armendariz resigned from the EPA in April after comments he made two years earlier came to light, where he talked about his philosophy of enforcement: making a big example of lawbreakers. But his language was coarse. âIt was kinda like how the Romans used to conquer those villages in the Mediterranean,â he said in the video. âTheyâd go into a little Turkish town somewhere, theyâd find the first five guys they saw, and theyâd crucify them. And you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.â Within days of that video becoming public, Armendariz resigned.
The ERCOT headquarters in Taylor, TX. StateImpact Texas was given a tour of the facilities on June 6, 2012.
The ERCOT Grid Control Center at their headquarters in Taylor, TX. Controllers route electricity through over 40,000 circuit miles of high-voltage transmission wires.
Inside the ERCOT Grid Control Center at their headquarters in Taylor, TX. Human controllers can override computers if power is at risk.
When generators fail, controllers lean on large electricity users, like factories, that are paid to be ready to shut everything off at a momentâs notice.
Controllers monitor supply and demand to keep them perfectly balanced.
Controllers tweak the balance of supply and demand by activating backup generators.
Controllers make daily forecasts of the next dayâs electric demand and supply down to every five minutes.
Controllers balance the need for power with the power given by their 550 generators in order to not waste resources.
Controllers look at wind and solar energy, which can vary the access of gatherable resources.
Controllers are in charge of monitoring every slight variation in power gathered, routed, and delivered to its 23 million consumers.
Controllers look at a distribution system so electricity can flow not just to consumers, but wherever it is needed most.
Imagine this: youâve just gotten home from work. You worked right through lunch, as you often do, and now you just want to throw your pasta on the stove and relax in your air-conditioned home while you catch up with the news and… CLICK. Now your powerâs out.
That frustration you just felt is exactly what the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the Texas Grid, is trying to prevent. However, itâs more complicated than just generating enough power for everyone.
StateImpact Texas got to see the ERCOT grid control center in person this week in order to get a better understanding of how blackouts are managed and limited. (You can see a slideshow of photos taken inside ERCOT above.) At the end of the day, it all comes down to a balance between load (demand for electricity) and generation of power. Continue Reading →
Chesapeake Energy is one of the “world’s biggest frackers” and a major player in Texas, and today they hold their annual shareholder meeting. It comes after weeks of bad news and eye-opening investigations into the company, particularly the unconventional financial dealings of its CEO Aubrey McClendon.
You can tune in below, and chime in with questions for the reporters in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania â and you can follow @StateImpactOK on Twitter for more updates.
A petrochemical plant using flares to burn off flammable vapors
It’s no secret that Texas and the EPA don’t get along.
Just a day after state regulators spent hours in Washington blasting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the EPA today announced plans to approve changes to Texas’s Clean Air Plan that the agency has been insisting on for more than two years.
The new permitting program for Texas is called Plant-Wide Applicability Limits (PALS), modeled after an existing federal program. (So you could say that after today, the TCEQ and EPA are real PALS.)
There’s quite a bit of background here, but in short, you can count this round as a win for the EPA.
Reporters there will be giving a play-by-play, and our partners at StateImpact Pennsylvania will be chiming in with relevant links and information concerning the natural gas giant and ‘world’s biggest fracker.’
The meeting starts at 10 a.m. CST. Enter your email on the right for a reminder, and you can follow StateImpact Oklahoma on Twitter @StateImpactOK.
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