The extreme drought and 2011 releases to farmers lowered levels in Lakes Buchanan and Travis (pictured) in Central Texas. Now a state agency is saying more study is needed into how the reservoirs are managed.
In the ongoing battle over water in the Highland Lakes of Central Texas, the City of Austin and lake residents and businesses scored something of a victory this week when the state told the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) that its water management plan will need more review.
The LCRA manages the water in the Highland Lakes, including the main reservoirs of Buchanan and Travis, which are vital sources of water for Austin. Until 2012, those reservoirs also provided massive amounts of water for rice farmers downstream. In 2011 — the driest year in Texas’ recorded history — Â the LCRA, under its existing management plan, released three times as much water to the rice farmers from the lakes as Austin used from them that entire year. (Last year and this year, under emergency plans, the LCRA cut off most rice farmers from water for irrigation.)
In 2012, the LCRA came up with an updated plan that would have helped prevent such releases of water during times of extreme drought. But it had to be approved by the state environmental agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). After reviewing the proposed plan and hearing opposition from the public as well as some prominent politicians, the state agency is saying that the water management plan needs more work. Specifically, it needs to reflect the drier times affecting Texas and include more recent data. Continue Reading →
Increased use of natural gas to generate power in the U.S. is contributing to a decline in greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new report from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) out today.
While coal still makes up a substantial percentage of the nation’s electricity, particularly when power demands rise in the summer, the group predicts that natural gas will have an increasingly dominant role in the energy sector, resulting in lower emissions.
Coal still generates, on average, more of America’s electricity than natural gas. According to the report, natural gas accounted for 25 percent of power generation from November 2012 to March 2013. In comparison, coal generated an average 40 percent of the nation’s monthly electricity supply during the same period. (For a brief moment last spring, natural gas actually tied coal in power generation, but coal came back ahead afterwards.) And in the overall energy picture, including things like power generation, vehicle fuels, heating buildings and industrial use, natural gas made up 27 percent of total energy use in 2012.
While coal still dominates energy production, the report predicts natural gas will supply not only more of the nation’s future power, but also more of the nation’s general energy demands. Natural gas could eventually “overtake petroleum as the most popular primary energy source in the U.S.,” the report says. Continue Reading →
The Texas grid is forecasting a dry, hotter-than-normal summer. This map shows what percentage of normal rainfall different parts of the state can expect.
Sno Cone stands are open, school’s almost out, and thermometers across the state are getting closer and closer to reading a hundred, if they haven’t already. As another summer approaches, Texans are wondering what kind of season is in store.
If the forecasts of meteorologist Chris Coleman turn out to be correct, this summer may well be a hot one, though not as bad as the record-breaking summer of 2011. Coleman is the new meteorologist for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which manages the power grid that serves most of the state.
He was brought on six months ago to develop forecasts for the grid’s managers. As power supplies tighten, and the state’s population grows (along with hotter-than-normal summers), Texas finds itself with shrinking margins of reserve power in case something goes wrong on the grid. And power demand is forecast to reach a record level this summer in Texas, even though temperatures aren’t likely to be as hot as they were in 2011.
While forecasting isn’t new to ERCOT (it’s been contracted out for the most part up until now), Coleman hopes to bring a more robust approach, using more data than before. “I’m working to see how accurate the forecasts in place were, and adding my forecast to the mix,” Coleman said Friday at a meeting held by the Gulf Coast Power Association. “Every forecaster has their own approach.”
There have been two constant questions ever since the record heat and drought of 2011, Coleman says: Will we have another 2011? And how long will the drought continue? Continue Reading →
Lake Meredith is currently at a level too low for municipalities to draw water from it, according to Dr. David Brauer with the Ogallala Aquifer Research Project.
Heavy rains over Memorial Day weekend helped pull more of the state from the depths of an ongoing drought. Parts of Northeast Texas along the Red River joined the Houston area as the three percent of the state no longer under abnormally dry or drought conditions.
Dr. David Brauer, a USDA researcher who manages the Ogallala Aquifer Research Project, says the continuance of the drought is taking a major toll on the region’s already stressed water resources. Continue Reading →
Hurricane Sandy strikes the East Coast on October 28, 2012. Forecasters are predicting an active hurricane season this year.
Tomorrow marks the beginning of the six-month Atlantic hurricane season, and forecasters think it might be a doozy.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts this coming season will produce more than 13 named storms. An average season produces 12, but the amount of hurricanes and major hurricanes is predicted to be above average as well.
Dr. Gerry Bell, lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA says this summer will have at least two of the three main factors that lead meteorologists to predict a strong season. Continue Reading →
Tesla plans to have six super-charging stations in Texas within the next six months, with more to come.
The luxury electric car company Tesla announced plans today to rapidly expand its network of “super-charging stations” across the country, including a number of spots in Texas. But the company still can’t sell to consumers in Texas directly, despite a strong effort to lobby state lawmakers to change the rules.
The charging stations are meant to allow drivers to go from city to city, and the company is planning to put them outside of Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Houston. In fact, the company plans to add so many charging stations that within six months, they say it will be possible to travel from Los Angeles to New York in a Tesla. The stations charge a car for 20 to 30 minutes, allowing a Tesla S to run for around three hours of driving, and are free for Tesla owners. (Other electric cars, however, cannot charge at the stations.) That’s significantly faster than existing public charging stations in Texas, but Tesla’s East Coast network of charging stations was negatively reviewed in the New York Times earlier this year. And that review was subsequently criticized by the paper’s public editor. Regardless, the controversy doesn’t appear to have slowed Tesla down: the company posted its first profitable quarter recently, earned a near-perfect score from Consumer Reports for the Model S, and paid off its federal loans nine years early.
Water was one of the big topics this legislative session, as a growing state faced strained supplies and year after year of drought. Well before things kicked off this year, a plan surfaced to take $2 billion from the state’s Rainy Day Fund to start a water bank that would fund pipelines, reservoirs, conservation and more. That plan had widespread support, yet still faced opposition from Tea Party conservatives in the House. Ultimately, a mix of bills was put together to start the water bank and reform the agency that will oversee it, the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB). But not so fast.
While Governor Rick Perry signed off on a big part of the plan earlier this week with HB 4, there’s one catch: in order for the bank to get up and running, voters will have to approve it. There wasn’t enough will in the legislature to break the state’s spending cap and spend the money themselves, so instead voters will be making that decision on the ballot this November.
How’d we get to this California-esque decision? KUT’s Ben Philpott tells the tale of how Texas lawmakers decided to take a gamble and put the choice to voters this fall in what’s likely to be a low-turnout, off-year election: Continue Reading →
Just as Gov. Rick Perry and lawmakers finalize plans to spend $2 billion on water-supply projects around the state, a court decision could force Texas to rethink its water-planning process.
Last week, Texas’ 11th Court of Appeals ruled that two regional plans feeding into the 2012 state water plan — a 300-page document that underlies the Legislature’s new water initiatives — contained conflicting recommendations.
In the case, Texas Water Development Board v. Ward Timber, the appellate court upheld a lower court’s decision and ruled against the Texas Water Development Board, the architect of the state water plan.
It ruled in favor of landowners concerned about the proposed construction of a reservoir on their property, and urged the water board to come up with a “a more considered plan.”
The water board could appeal to the Texas Supreme Court. But if the ruling is upheld, the upshot, according to some water experts, is that Texas’ water planning process is now far more open to legal challenges. Continue Reading →
Fracking seems to be the gift that keeps on giving to Texans of all pay grades. Not only are roughnecks and engineers in big demand, so are lawyers who specialize in oil & gas. At the biggest firms, young lawyers can start at $160,000 a year. For top partners, their time can be billed at a rate of up $1,000 an hour according to the American Bar Association.
“The different clients that I have, fortunately enough, were all driven by fracking because without that technology that market would never have opened,” said James Collura.
Dave Fehling / StateImpact
James Collura is an oil & gas lawyer in Houston.
Collura is an oil & gas attorney with the Houston firm of Coats Rose. It’s not one of those “big” firms and says it prides itself on keeping costs low.
Nonetheless, Collura said his firm is paying higher starting salaries despite what has been happening in other states where hiring is down dramatically. Continue Reading →
E.V. Spence Reservoir in Robert Lee Texas is running dry. The latest iteration of the Texas Water Plan could help Texas' water supply, if it is funded.
During the worst of the Texas drought, in 2011, when temperatures soared, dessicated lake beds cracked open, rivers dried to a trickle and several towns nearly ran out of water, Texas Governor Rick Perry asked all Texans to pray for rain.
It was not a novel remedy to Texas’ recurring drought problem. Nearly 60 years earlier, in 1953, Governor Allen Shivers asked all of Texas’ ministers to pray for precipitation.
In addition to prayers, the drought of record — as the 1950s drought is known — also spurred Texas officials to write the first State Water Plan, forecasting Texas’ water needs in the coming decades. In November, Texans will decide whether to put $2 billion from the state’s rainy day fund to a contemporary version of that plan. So now may be a good time to look back the history of the water plan, its successes and failures, before making that choice.
Glancing back at those old water plans, one can see a document that shaped enduring features of the Texas landscape. But back when officials wrote the first plan, Texas was a different state, says Andy Sansom, Director of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University.
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