On the LAKE Front

The LAKE blog has moved

This blog has moved to a new wordpress site. Please follow the link.

Apple: from 35% to 75% renewable energy in two years

All it takes is the will to get it done, and Apple is doing it: from 35% renewable energy in 2010 to 75% in 2012, and 100% at all Apple data centers. Cost? They'll save more than they spent. Time for Georgia Power and Southern Company to stop dragging their feet and help us get on with it in Georgia.

Peter Burrows wrote for Bloomberg Thursday that Apple got nudged:

Work Session this morning? Lowndes County web site down again @ LCC 2013-02-25

Is there a County Commission Work Session this morning at 8:30 AM? Can't find out from the county's website: it's down again. Is this a good way to demonstrate that Internet access is "one of the number one issues"?

First noticed about 7AM, http://www.lowndescounty.com/ not responding, same as three weeks ago. Once again I also tried it from somewhere far away geographically and on another ISP, with the same results as last time.

Alert!: Unexpected network read error; connection aborted.

So it looks like the Lowndes County Commission's website is down. Speaking of far away, why does it seem to be hosted in Dallas, Texas?

Well, let's see if there's any information on their facebook page. Nope; still content-free.

Here's a response Gretchen got from County Clerk Paige Dukes when she inquired after the last outage:

Speakupaustin: a major MSA and local government transparency

The Austin reporting program is in addition to the posting a City Council agenda more than a week in advance (here's the 28 Feb 2013 agenda already on 16 Feb 2013) and including the entire board packets with working papers and other backup documentation with the minutes. Austin televises and webcasts its meetings live, with close captioning and transcripts online. They don't limit the number of citizens who can speak, or the subjects they can speak on, and they televise and webcast all of them as well. Plus citizens can speak on specific agenda issues, and Austin has an online forum for citizen suggestions on which citizens can vote on the ones they like.

Is there still back-door politics in Austin? For sure. But you can see a lot more of what is going on in Austin than they can about the local governments here, and citizens have a lot more input.

If Valdosta and Lowndes County (and Hahira and Lake Park and Dasher and Remerton) want to be treated like a major MSA, they might consider following Austin's lead. Instead of decreasing citizen input by exiling all citizen speakers to the end of a meeting and limiting the number who can speak, while not even putting board packets online, consider continually increasing local government transparency and citizen input.

-jsq

Lowndes County web site not responding

First noticed about 1PM, still down at 3:30PM, for http://www.lowndescounty.com/

Safari can't open the page
Safari can't open the page "http://www.lowndescounty.com/" because the server unexpectedly dropped the connection. This sometimes occurs when the server is busy. Wait for a few minutes, and then try again.

Similar results with Firefox and Google-Chrome.

I even tried it from somewhere far away geographically and on another ISP, and got this with lynx:

Alert!: Unexpected network read error; connection aborted.
Can't Access `http://www.lowndescounty.com/'
Alert!: Unable to access document.

So it looks like the Lowndes County Commission's website is down.

Have you seen their facebook page? Here's the entire contents of it:

Tourism Board Meeting @ VLCCCTA 2013-01-23

Last week I went to the Rainwater Conference Center to attend the Valdosta-Lowndes County Conference Center & Tourism Authority Board Meeting.

I had discovered the time and date of this meeting by asking at the information booth at the Conference Center one day when I was there for another event.

I arrived slightly before the 8:00 appointed time and was greated warmly by Councilman Tim Carroll and Conference Center Director Tim Riddle. Being the Conference Center, they served a hot breakfast (other morning boards have fruits and sweets but this was something that you might get up for).

As 8:00 came there was apparently not a quorum, so calls went out to missing members to see if one more could be attacted. At 8:15 it was clear that there would be no additional members coming so no formal meeting was held, no votes were taken but an informal review of the agenda was performed:

Videos: new website @ VLCIA 2013-01-15

Both Meghan Duke (PR and Marketing) and Andrea Schruijer (Executive Director) invited comments and additional information for the new website. They were speaking to their board at its meeting last night, but in the Industrial Authority's new conversational spirit, maybe they'll take suggestions from the rest of the community, as well. Both Allan Ricketts (Project Manager) and J. Stephen Gupton (Attorney) said the Hahira well site work was going well. They've got a new intern, and I reminded them about the need for fast Internet access. It was a long meeting by County Commission standards, yet short for Industrial Authority meeting: about half an hour.

Here's the agenda, with links to the videos, and a few notes.

-jsq

Industrial Authority: new website, same old agenda tonight @ VLCIA 2013-01-15

The Industrial Authority has a spiffy new website under a new domain, buildlowndes.com, and with their new logo, formerly only on their facebook page. Their meeting agenda for tonight, however, is the same old recycled content-free placeholder.

I sure don't miss the old hexagon menu, the new menu is up top and usable before they waste a bunch of space with stock photos. The Our Team page even links to the Linkedin profiles of Andrea Schruijer and Meghan Duke. While Allan Ricketts does have a Linkedin profile, it's not very fleshed out and they don't link to it.

The Recent Investments page is interesting, although it would be more so if

Google invests in wind and solar

While Southern Company and Georgia Power pour money down that nuclear pit by the Savannah River and Progress Energy can't afford to fix its Crystal River nuke, Google's wind and solar projects are already online on time, all for less than the cost overruns so far at Vogtle or the fix-it price at Crystal River.

David Goldman wrote for CNN Money 10 January 2013, Google invests $200 million in Texas wind farm,

"We look for projects like Spinning Spur because, in addition to creating more renewable energy and strengthening the local economy, they also make for smart investments," Kojo Ako-Asare, Google's senior manager of corporate finance, said in a blog post.

Ako-Asare added that wind farms offer "attractive returns relative to the risks."

Which is the opposite of nuclear's huge risks relative to the apparently negative returns. So how much wind and solar energy does Google generate?

2012 solar deployments driven by Moore's Law price reductions

Moore's Law for solar is about decreasing price per Watt, or more Watts per dollar. Here's an example of a common confusion, to think it's about efficiency:

“The curve will obviously become asymptotic at some point, ie,. the rate of improvement will flatten out, so we end up with a sort of squashed "S" shape curve, because you can't get more than 100% efficiency — 36 watts/m² or so.”

And indeed efficiency probably will flatten out soon. But it's not solar efficiency that's improving by Moore's Law: it's price per watt. That can keep improving for a long time.

Here's an example of decreasing price. Scott Detrow wrote for NPR 23 December 2012, Forget Fracking: 2012 Was A Powerful Year For Renewables,

"Just to give you perspective," Resh said, "in Washington, D.C., where I live, when I installed solar on my house six years ago, the average install cost was about $14 a watt. Today it's about $4 a watt."

Here's another comparison, this one just for solar panels. In 2005 the first set of solar panels we got cost $670 each and produced 170 Watts DC each, or $4.94/Watt. In 2011 our second set of solar panels cost $562 each for 235 Watts DC each, or $2.39/Watt. That's more than 50% price decrease for solar panels in six years. (I can't compare inverters or support structures directly, because those were sized so differently, but those have also come down in price, helping lower the overall install cost).

Year	price /Watt	price /panel	Watts /panel	Dimens.	square inches	Watts /100 sq in.	Model
2005	$4.94	$670	170W	50x39"	1950	8.7	KC 170
2011	$2.39	$562	235W	39.1x64.6"	2525	9.3	Sharp ND 235 QCJ
2012	$1.32	$310	235W	39.1x64.6"	2525	9.3	Sharp ND 235 QCJ

Meanwhile, the Watts per surface area hardly changed, from about