Jennifer Ronk with the Houston Advanced Research Center
Global demand for solar panels could soon create shortages according to Bloomberg News.
In Texas, costs for solar are dropping and the amount of power Texans now get from the sun is up over 30-percent in the past year. But while some housing developments are banning the roof-top solar panels, saying they’re unsightly, some homeowners in one Houston neighborhood can’t imagine life without solar power.
It’s the hottest part of the day in a subdivision on Houston’s northwest side. The neatly-kept streets and lawns border several rows of recently-built, two-story homes made of brick and stone. They all look similar but a few of them have one difference: solar panels.
“They don’t even notice them till we tell (visitors) we have solar panels, they’re like where,” said Velia Uballe, a stay-at-home mom.
They bought their new, solar-panel equipped house three years ago. But while Uballe said the panels hardly stand out, what they’re saving on electricity definitely does.
The LCRA operates the six dams on the Colorado River that form the scenic Highland Lakes of Central Texas. Photo by Reshma Kirpalani for KUT News and Reporting Texas
Water from the Highland Lakes is important to everyone in Central Texas — from urban Austinites to rural rice farmers downstream. Wednesday, the board of the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) was set to vote on a much-delayed plan to manage that water, but the authority’s board postponed that vote to gather more public input.
The proposed plan, which would ensure that more water stays in the lakes in times of drought, is widely supported by upstream stakeholders, namely the City of Austin. But it’s unpopular downstream with agricultural interests that would likely see themselves cut off from water more often. The plan must ultimately be approved by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ).
The LCRA board postponed the vote on the plan for thirty days until Sept. 17 to get more public input. But the board made it clear it doesn’t want to change the “framework of the plan” — including a provision to maintain “above 600,000 acre-feet of water” in the lakes. Under previous water plans, water could be sent to agricultural users even if storage dropped below that level.
The sun sets waves wash up from the Gulf of Mexico onto the beach April 13, 2011 in Isla Grand Terre, Louisiana. T
Most of the fisheries are managed in federal waters and represent a $14 billion dollar industry.
But pirate fishing hurts commercial fishers, like Scott Hickman of the Charter Fisherman’s Association.
He told the Gulf Coast Leadership conference that it’s getting hard to make a living competing with those who skirt around the law. He says it’s a real problem.
“They’re flooding our markets with illegal fish on the commercial side, and they’re taking the ability for the charter boat fleet to be able to go out and make a living, because they’re pulling fish away from the same pool of fish that I need, to take the people that are coming down here to the coast on vacation, to go catch these fish,” said Hickman. Continue Reading →
A Chesapeake Energy Corp. worker stands beside a Chesapeake oil drilling rig on the Eagle Ford shale near Crystal City, Texas, June 6, 2011.
The oil and gas industry added 10,500 new jobs over the second quarter, according to industry news service Rigzone. That’s a two-thirds increase over the same period in 2013.
Between April and June, companies in the oil and gas sector added more than 4,000 new positions in Texas. That gave the Lone Star State a commanding lead in job creation for the industry. Louisiana came in second, with about 600 new oil and gas jobs. Alaska took third with 500.
“In total, looking at the first half of the year, over 20,000 positions in the U.S. were created,” says Paul Caplan, president of Rigzone. “Last year at this time, the halfway mark of the year was about 12,600, so we’re talking about a substantial increase in the number of, especially, production jobs.”
Turnover in the oil and gas industry is running on the high side. In the second quarter, nearly 17,000 professionals a month voluntarily left jobs in the mining and logging industry, which Rigzone uses as a proxy for the U.S. oil and gas sector. That compares to an average of roughly 12,000 workers a month over the past ten years.
A stream of workers leave the TXU Monticello power plant near Mt. Pleasant, Texas February 26, 2007.
In Austin, business leaders and politicians blasted new federal rules aimed at reducing air pollution from power plants. At a hearing held by the Texas Public Utility Commission, there were dire predictions of a ruined Texas economy and higher electricity costs for residents.
Hour-after-hour, the three members of the Texas Public Utility Commission heard why the state’s roaring economy, some call it the Texas Miracle, could be brought to its knees
“I fear were going be on the road again to try to persuade people why this is the potential — if it were to come to pass in this form — death knell to the Texas Miracle and frankly the kind of economic destruction this would create nationally is a little hard to overstate, “said Phillip Oldham, a lobbyist for the big business group, the Texas Association of Manufacturers.
The chairman of the PUC, Donna Nelson, predicted an end to the Texas deregulated electricity market. Continue Reading →
A hydraulic fracking operation in the Barnett Shale.
An environmental group says it’s found over a hundred oil or gas wells being drilled in Texas using techniques that the group says are illegal. At issue is “fracking” which injects huge quantities of water and chemicals deep underground.
Fracking is what’s revolutionized drilling in Texas. The technique uses all sorts of chemicals including acids that are injected by the thousands of gallons down into wells to break up rock so gas and oil can escape.
There’ve always been concerns that the chemicals could risk contaminating groundwater, but state and federal regulators have allowed drillers to use dozens of different substances.
Azle and Reno are the epicenter for the North Texas earthquake swarm that mobilized residents earlier this year to call on the state to respond.
The agency that regulates the Texas oil and gas industry announced new rules this week aimed at curbing manmade earthquakes tied to oil and gas drilling operations.
Texas has had hundreds of small and medium quakes over the last few years as drilling has boomed thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling. But for years the Railroad Commission maintained that the quakes weren’t really a problem. They said the science wasn’t settled, despite numerous studies. Now, after public outcry over a swarm of quakes in North Texas earlier this year, the commission is starting to do something.
“It’s kinda like when you’re in a 12-step program,” says Cyrus Reed with the Sierra Club in Austin. “You know, the first thing you need to do admit that you have a problem. And I think the Railroad Commission has done that by proposing these rules.” Continue Reading →
Houston has the third highest number of CEOs with pilot licenses according to a study assessing risk-taking among executives
It’s a sign of success: having your own plane and being your own pilot. In fact, Houston ranks third in the nation for the number of corporate chief executives who have pilot licenses. Dallas ranks sixth. But as highlighted by a tragedy earlier this spring in West Texas, there may be an added risk. But is that bad for the company’s bottom line?
On a Wednesday afternoon this past June, a turboprop plane took off from Aspen Colorado.
Destination: Brenham Texas, northwest of Houston.
As the plane headed southeast, crossing over the Texas panhandle, it encountered a big line of thunderstorms. The on-line tracking service FlightAware shows the plane turned sharply to the south. It was sometime later that afternoon that a rancher would find the crumpled wreckage in an open field just west of Lubbock.
In the floodplain, several inches of fine silty mud sit atop thick, heavy clay. The clay is the finest dust eroded by the river, carried until this point then deposited as the river spreads out across the prairie. The silt is a thick rich mixture of sediment from upstream. The land in the floodplain naturally holds water very well.
In 2012, some farming districts on the Lower Colorado River were cut off from water for irrigation for the first time. Reservoirs were too low to flood tens of thousands of rice fields. Some asked, “Why would anyone be farming rice in Texas in the first place?”
The answer is long, and it begins with the fact that parts of Texas haven’t always been dry. For farmers like Ronald Gertson, who remembers driving a tractor through rice fields as a child, recent years have been hard to bear.
“It’s just unbelievable that it’s been so bad that we have had three unprecedented years in a row, and I recognize some experts say we could have a couple of decades like this. I hope and pray that’s not the case,” says Gertson, a rice farmer, chair of numerous water-related committees and, in recent years, unofficial spokesman for the Texas Rice Belt. “If that is the case then yeah, this whole prairie is going to change.”
A rig contracted by Apache Corp drills a horizontal well in a search for oil and natural gas in the Wolfcamp shale located in the Permian Basin in West Texas.
The latest drought monitor from the USDA shows about 60% of Texas still suffering from a lack of rain and strained water resources.
Some landowners argue they’re conscious of how they treat the land, even if they do sell water for drilling, since after all, it’s their land. Continue Reading →
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