What needs no washing, no irrigation, emits no wastewater, and disturbs no wetlands, while producing revenue for years after local installation jobs? 74.9 Megawatts AC of solar power going in at 4370 SW 80 Street, Trenton, Florida, assuming the Gilchrist BOCC approved it last week as staff recommended.
Gilchrist Board of County Commissioners, Full Agenda, June 4, 2018, page 69: Continue reading
Dear pipeline companies: if you gouge through a rock-star farmer’s world-record-holding soybean fields, you may find he gets national coverage.
Bryan Mitchell, March 6, 2018 08:16 AM, AgWeb powered by Farm Journal, Pipeline Nightmare: Randy Dowdy Calls For Independent Investigation,
Randy Dowdy’s soil death is no mystery, insists the Georgia producer, and now a federal inspection report appears to back his claims of soil damage on record-breaking farmland due to pipeline construction. A letter (Feb. 6) from the Federal Regulatory Commission (FERC) to the Sabal Trail Pipeline Project describes “topsoil and subsoil mixing” on Dowdy’s farming operation, yet significantly does not address issues of noncompliance.
GA-BR-029.000 Dowdy south field, Little Creek, MP 217, 1657-PL-DG-70197-219, 30.9439700, -83.6154600Dowdy signed Continue reading
Leaks of hazardous materials, explosions, land takings, sinkholes, frac-outs: these are far bigger threats than Texas Rep. Lamar Smith’s Committee report “that states Russian agents were attempting to disrupt U.S. energy markets and using social media to purportedly stir up protests against pipelines such as Sabal Trail,” as a reporter asked me about recently. Smith’s report doesn’t mention that solar and wind power are growing far faster than his favorite, fracked methane gas.
Business Council for Sustainable Energy by Bloomberg New Energy Finance,
February 2018,
2018 Sustainable Energy in America.
Elsewhere I already looked behind Lamar Smith’s fossil fuel smoke and mirrors, and found I post more on social media than the tiny Russian numbers that horrify him.
His actual examples are seriously rolling-on-the-floor laughable, such as this: Continue reading
FERC just let slip the wolves of sun and wind by enabling the storage that those sunny twenty-first-century “aggregated distributed energy resources” (DER) will use to blow down the straw houses of traditional twentieth-century so-called baseload capacity coal, oil, and nuclear power plants.
FERC Commissioner Robert F. Powelson called out the “participation model” Thursday’s twin orders enable, bypassing many traditional charges by accounting for physical characteristics that do not change over time, recognizing that batteries, sun, and wind power are basically different from old-style dinosaur power plants. Commissioner Neil Chatterjee named Senators Ed Markey and Sheldon Whitehouse as proponents of these new rules, which is very interesting since both have long been proponents of renewable energy, and Sen. Whitehouse called out FERC for failing to implement the DC Circuit Court’s Order on greenhouse gases. Commissioner Cheryl A. LaFleur said “Electric storage is like a ‘Swiss army knife’”. Maybe more like the South Australian storage utility player that has already out-responded natural gas during coal plant outages. Commissioner Richard Glick says sun and wind power “no less than energy storage, have the potential to play a leading role in the electric grid of the future”. None of the Commissioners could bring themselves to say what they all know: sun, wind, water power with storage will be the electric grid of the future. Former FERC Chair Jon Wellinghoff and I were right in 2013: solar power will provide more U.S. electricity than any other source by 2023, on the way to complete conversion of everything to sun, wind, water, and storage by 2050.
Giles Parkinson, Reneweconomy, 23 January 2018,
Tesla big battery moves from show-boating to money-making.
Gavin Bade, UtilityDive, Feb. 15, 2018, FERC issues storage, reliability orders, calls conference on aggregated DERs, Continue reading
Court mandate delayed because of FERC crying wolf, even though Sabal Trail has been shut down most of the past six, now seven weeks. So the three little pigs get a temporary reprieve from the Big Bad Wolf of sun and wind power.
Gavin Bade, E&E News, Feb. 8, 2018, Court filings stave off Sabal Trail pipeline shutdown, for now,
But Wednesday came and went this week with no word from the court.
E&E reports that may be because judges need time to consider some last-minute filings in the case.
What are FERC and Sabal Trail so scared of? The wind and the sun:
‘Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in.’
So he huffed, and he puffed, and he blew his house in, and ate up the little pig.
Illustration for
The Story of the Three Little Pigs,
in English Fairy Tales, Joseph Jacobs, 1895 New York: Grosset & Dunlap (2nd edition?) Boston Public Library.
For the entire four years since the Sabal Trail pipeline was first announced in 2013, renewable energy has produced more new U.S. energy than natural gas, according to FERC’s own Office of Energy Projects Energy Infrastructure Update For December 2017. Those are the wolves Continue reading
Update 2018-02-08: FERC cry of wolf delays mandate from DC Circuit Court
Instead of answering Sabal Trail’s
Friday cry of wolf by issuing new certificates yesterday,
FERC instead took that cry to the DC Circuit Court,
asking for a delay of today’s issue of a mandate.
FERC did not issue new certificates yesterday,
and the Court did not issue a mandate today.
Of course, today was merely the first day the Court
could have issued a mandate, so we’ll see.
Don’t listen to FERC and Sabal Trail’s cries of wolf, Court!
What’s really eating their pipelines is solar and wind power
taking over the market.
For
the fourth year running, renewable energy has produced more
new U.S. energy than natural gas,
according to
FERC’s own
Office of Energy Projects Energy Infrastructure Update For December 2017.
Four years means ever since the Sabal Trail pipeline was first announced in 2013.
Those are the wolves after those poor pipeline Applicants: solar and wind power.
Gavin Bade, Utility Dive, Feb. 6, 2018,
FERC asks DC Circuit to delay issuing order to halt Sabal Trail pipeline, Continue reading 2018-01-07 2018-02-07.
The illustration
by Francis Barlow Aesop’s fable “The Boy who Cried Wolf”, called by him DE PASTORIS PUERO ET AGRICOLIS, 1687
In less than three hours since I submitted the WWALS motion to deny Sabal Trail’s sketchy request for emergency certificates, four more major filings appeared: FERC rubberstamped a Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (FSEIS), FPL cheered on the so-called emergency request, Georgia State Rep. Debbie Buckner objected, and Sierra Club objected. Sabal Trail said it best:
The Commission should decline the Applicants’ invitation to subvert the Court’s determination that the Project cannot operate pending compliance with NEPA.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Hahira, GA, February 5, 2018 — Suwannee Riverkeeper objects to Sabal Trail’s last-minute Request to make an end run around an impending mandate from the D.C. Circuit Court that could shut that pipeline down. Granting the Applicants’ Request for reissued or emergency certificates would amount to the same kind of “multi-billion dollar bailout” that FERC recently rejected for the failing coal and nuclear industries, this time targeted at the natural gas industry. The Applicants for that Request claim need for the pipeline, yet they cite themselves for evidence, in a massive conflict of interest, with internal contradictions, and replete with conflicts with other sources deriving from some of those same Applicants.
If, as U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently said in Warsaw, Poland, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline being built by Russian gas giant Gazprom PJSC is “undermining Europe’s overall energy stability and security,” and Europe should seek to diversify energy supplies, the same applies to the Sabal Trail natural gas pipeline Canadian gas giant Enbridge is now seven months late building through the U.S. Southeast. The Sunshine State already gets 60% of its electricity from existing pipelines, and it should get on with solar power.
The Applicants listed in Friday’s Request are Continue reading
We visited every Florida statehouse member who represents any part of the Suwannee River Basin, Wednesday in Tallahasse, we the people attending ReThink Energy Florida’s event.
Suwannee Riverkeeper Banner in Waller Park; thanks Kristin Rubin.
And a primary goal of that lobbying was achieved: the fracking ban bill is sheduled for a committee vote Monday.
When: 4:30 PM – 6PM, Monday, February 5, 2018
Where:
Mallory Horne Committee Room, 37 Senate Office Building,
400 Monroe Street, Tallahassee, Florida
Event: facebook.
Stand with us and Continue reading
FERC, if it follows its own rules, should reject the DSEIS, stop Sabal Trail, and revoke its permit, says a motion filed today with FERC by Suwannee Riverkeeper.
Followup blog posts will feature major sections and arguments from these 20 pages with their 93 footnotes. The basic arguments are summarized on the first page:
WWALS argues that no SEIS can be complete without accounting for GHG from Liquid Natural Gas (“LNG”) exports, nor without comparing natural gas to solar power, according to precedents already set by FPL, FERC, and others, which also reopen the whole basis of the FERC 2016 Order.
FERC may not care, but the D.C. Circuit Court may, or candidates for office, or the voting public.
-jsq, John S. Quarterman, Suwannee RIVERKEEPER®
You can join this fun and work by becoming a WWALS member today!