Archive for the ‘California’ Tag
I’m loving this whole solar thing.
Driving to Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, I drove by Ivanpah, which is a tri-headed solar farm that will be coming online this summer. Click on the picture at right to get a better look at how one of the steam-driven solar collectors works. You really don’t get a sense of the scale of this project driving by … you just know it’s large.
It’s not. It’s massive.
It’s a 3,500 acre installation … that’s almost 5-1/2 square miles! No wonder desert lovers are up in arms about this project … it’s truly destroying a very large swath of pristine desert, all in the hopes of creating some “green” energy. It’s been 5 years in the making, and will generate an additional 3,500 megawatts when it comes online. The project is costing $2.2 billion. And it’s not even working yet.
BrightSource’s Ivanpah solar plant, shown in these images, took more than five years to permit, finance, and build. The technology features thousands of mirrors that direct sunlight at a central tower to produce steam and power a turbine. Utilities in California are looking seriously at the technology because they must deliver a third of their power to consumers from renewables by 2020.
In 2012, California became the first state to install more than 1,000 megawatts of solar collection capacity (that’s over 1 gigawatt). That’s going to be shattered in 2013 … and we’re not done. Another huge project is coming online in Riverside County, east of LA County, and that two-headed project is costing $2.6 billion and has a capacity of 500 megawatts.
While the utilities are investing b-b-b-b-billions in solar, consumers are also getting on the bandwagon, and putting solar panels up on their roofs. That isn’t a very efficient way to lower their energy bills (see link below), but it is having a direct affect on how much they pay to the electrical utilities each month.
Lancaster, California, became the first city in the country to require solar panels on all new housing construction. Given how solar is one of the least important things to lower power bills … good planning, Lancaster!
The irony that’s now becoming public is that California’s commitment to solar energy is actually going to hurt the poor. Here’s why:
“Low-income customers can’t put on solar panels — let’s be blunt,” said David K. Owens, executive vice president of the Edison Electric Institute, which represents utilities. “So why should a low-income customer have their rates go up for the benefit of someone who puts on a solar panel and wants to be credited the retail rate?”
It’s not just a California problem:
Other states, including New York, Massachusetts, Louisiana and Virginia, have also been reviewing their programs, which are transforming the fundamental relationship between customers and their utilities.
California schools have jumped on the band wagon … there’s a white paper, link below, on how school districts have embraced solar. Our local high school district, the William S. Hart Union High School District, has signed a 20-year agreement with a utility for “discounted” electrical rates, and in return they’ve “received” solar panel installations in a carport style over all of their parking lots. The good news for me as a tax payer, if you want to call it that, is that the School District signed this contract and since it’s zero cost, it’s “off book” – meaning there’s no direct budget impact. But there’s a 20-year commitment to buy electricity from the company that provided their solar panels for no charge.
I loved finding out that they installed the collectors at Valencia High School facing the wrong way.
That’s been fixed; here’s what their parking lot looks like now:
Valencia High School’s solar panels also provide shade to their parking lot.
Where is it all going? No clue. But our state is committed to creating more solar energy. Here’s hoping it all works out for the best.
More
How Green Do You Want Your Energy?
Mojave Desert Blog
Sacramento Business Journal: California’s First In Solar
Geek.com: Lancaster, CA
MIT Technology Review: Ivanpah
New York Times: The Fairness Debate
LA Times: Schools Install Solar
KCET.org: California School White Paper
LA Times photography: Ivanpah
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My Grandfather was the one who mowed his yard with a horse. Shown here with 4 generations: my Grandfather, Great Grandmother, and my Great Great Grandmother Baugher holding my mother. Looks like a nice lawn. 1930.
I am committed to taking responsibility for my lawn. As I confronted the truth of my G G G Aunt’s lack of lawn care, though, (pictures posted here and here), I began to question my assumptions … and remember my beginnings as a lawn care professional.
Mom tells me that her family didn’t have a lawn mower when she was a kid. This would have been in the 30s … and she remembers her father cutting the blue grass perhaps 2 or 3 times a summer … with a horse-drawn mower.
Why Do We Have Lawns?
Dr John Falk theorizes that we want lawns because we evolved on the savannas of Africa. Our roots lead us to prefer grassy areas with scattered trees. So why don’t we want monkeys in the trees, I wonder?
Lawns started with European nobility, actually. Louis XIV was the first to have a green lawn; his gardens at Versailles set a standard that the European aristocracy aspired to for centuries.
Lawns were one way that the rich could differentiate themselves from the working class. If you could afford to keep a lawn, that meant you didn’t “have” to cultivate that land to feed your family. You had more land than you needed, so you could just plant grass that you couldn’t even eat! Conspicuous consumption in a pure form, as pointed out to me by Ed Darrell, who writes Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.
In the New World, it wasn’t until after the Revolutionary War that America’s leaders adopted lawns as well. Washington and Jefferson both had extensive lawns around their houses. Lawns didn’t make it to the common man until suburbs began to be built after the Civil War, according to Virginia Scott Jenkins, author of The Lawn: A History Of An American Obsession.
Once you have a lawn, you have to cut it. In the beginning, that was done with goats, sheep … and serfs. And thus began man’s love affair with the Saturday afternoon ritual of cutting the grass.
Here’s an illustration of the 1965 Craftsman riding mower that I used from elementary through high school. I even earned a dollar now and again.
But … I Live In A Desert!
Lawns aren’t normal in Southern California. Well, they are normal today, but they aren’t native.
California’s native animal species regard lawns as no different from concrete! Native species prefer the shrubs and grasses native to the chaparral climate that my area has.
That’s what they can live in. That’s what they can eat. Imported grass? Not their thing.
My newfound love of native plant species would work very well for a xeriscaping effort in my yard. And wouldn’t I prefer spiny succulents and dried grasses that require almost no water and less care instead of the high maintenance blue fescue grass that will require an incredibly needy 2 hours a month to maintain?
So, what should I do? I could keep the current lawn, meaning I have to buy a lawnmower and all of the wonderful tools necessary to keep a luxurious, soft, inviting green lawn.
Or, I can tear out all of the grass that we had installed 7 years ago and replace it with a native xeriscape that is friendly to both the water supply and the native animals. The downside, unfortunately, is that I’ll need to avoid walking barefoot across the lawn, feeling the grass between my toes.
I’m pretty sure the last time I did that, it was 2005.
More
Pulverized Concepts
mumpsimusthought
The Lawn: A History Of An American Obsession
England’s Old Lawnmower Club
American-Lawns.com
Growing Native
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1900 reelection poster celebrates McKinley standing tall on the gold standard with support from soldiers, sailors, businessmen, factory workers and professionals.
William McKinley (1843 – 1901)
The 25th President of the United States, 1897 – 1901
AKA: the Napoleon of Protection
From: Ohio
College: Allegheny College, Albany Law School
Married to: Ida Saxton
Children: Katherine, Ida
Party: Republican
Previous Jobs: postal clerk, teacher, militiaman, Major in the Union Army, lawyer, prosecuting attorney, US Congressman, Governor,
In His Words: “Our earnest prayer is that God will graciously vouchsafe prosperity, happiness, and peace to all our neighbors, and like blessings to all the peoples and powers of earth.”
“War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed.”
“Illiteracy must be banished from the land if we shall attain that high destiny as the foremost of the enlightened nations of the world which, under Providence, we ought to achieve.”
“We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny.”
“Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.”
Not true: Some would have you believe that McKinley lied in order for us to attack Cuba, launching the Spanish American War. However, there simply is no persuasive proof that this is true.
It’s certainly true that McKinley inherited a volatile situation with Spain. The repressive rule of Spain had led Cuba into open revolt. Some Americans were fighting alongside the Cubans after Spain put 300,000 Cubans into internment camps. Americans with Cuban investments pushed the government for action, and eventually McKinley sent the battleship Maine into Havana’s harbor. And then, on February 15, 1898, the ship blew up, killing 266 US sailors. Americans rallied around the flag, and the US Congress approved McKinley’s request for $50,000,000 in defense spending. War became inevitable.
But why did the ship blow up? We’ll never really know. Certainly in 1898, there were no scientific facts, there was only the actual event of American deaths while trying to quell an armed revolt just 90 miles from our shore.
The initial US Navy investigation blamed a mine that exploded, igniting the ship’s powder magazines. In 1974, Admiral Rickover had his staff look at the historical records, and they decided there was an internal explosion. National Geographic conducted another study in 1999 using computer modeling, and they concluded no definitive cause could be proved. So what happened? We don’t know. Did McKinley lie to start a war? No, but he did react to the ship’s sinking, and took the country into the 100-day Spanish American War
True: Guam, Hawaii and Puerto Rico all became part of the United States during the McKinley administrations. Cuba and the Philippines were also won in the Spanish American War, but granted independence soon after.
McKinley’s picture is on the $500 bill.
He was the last President to have served in the Union Army during the Civil War. He enlisted as a private, but ended as a brevet major.
His term as President was a prosperous one for the country.
The Official Portrait: August Benziger painted the official White House Portrait of McKinley. The President sat for the painting for several mornings at 8am, eventually taking to dictating his correspondence while Benziger sketched away. Over the course of several sittings, the painter experienced the personality of the President, which came through in the final work. 
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The Spanish American War
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I’m loving this whole solar thing.
