The Villanueva photovoltaic power plant is operated by the Italian company Enel Green Power in the desert near Villanueva, Mexico.
Credit: Alfredo Estrella / AFP
In a quest to cut the cost of clean electricity, power utilities around the world are supersizing their solar farms.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in southern Egypt, where what will be the world’s largest solar farm — a vast collection of more than 5 million photovoltaic panels — is now taking shape. When it’s completed next year, the $4 billion Benban solar park near Aswan will cover an area 10 times bigger than New York’s Central Park and generate up to 1.8 gigawatts of electricity.
Mayking Fire Chief Tony Fugate (left) and the volunteer fire department’s treasurer, Buddy Sexton, speak to residents about their station’s rising electricity costs during an Aug. 2 public meeting.
Credit: James Bruggers/InsideClimate News
WHITESBURG, KENTUCKY — Buddy Sexton opened a community meeting about the financial troubles of local volunteer fire departments with his head bowed: “Let people understand what a need we have in this county, in the mighty name of Jesus, we pray.”
Sexton then delivered some grim news to the gathering of about two dozen eastern Kentucky residents sitting in folding chairs set up in the engine bays of the Mayking Fire Department.
Just like the townspeople, his tiny department is facing crushing electric bills. They have gone up by several hundred dollars a month during the winter. That’s a lot in a local budget that is already strained as revenues from taxes on mining go steadily down.
“I’ve got financial reports here that I am afraid to look at anymore,” said Sexton, the department’s treasurer. “We’re in danger of shutting down.”
As […]
SOME OF THE BIGGEST FRACKING SITES — LIKE THE PERMIAN AND EAGLE FORD BASINS — ARE IN HIGHLY WATER STRESSED AREAS. CREDIT: DUKE UNIVERSITY.
An alarming new study reveals fracking is quite simply destroying America’s water supply.
That means we are losing potable water forever in many semi-arid regions of the country, while simultaneously producing more carbon pollution that in turn is driving ever-worsening droughts in those same regions, as fracking expert Anthony Ingraffea, a professor at Cornell University, explained to ThinkProgress.
The game-changing study from Duke University found that “from 2011 to 2016, the water use per well increased up to 770 percent.” In addition, the toxic wastewater produced in the first year of production jumped up to 1440 percent.
“Previous studies suggested hydraulic fracturing does not use significantly more water than other energy sources, but those findings were based only on aggregated data from the early years of fracking,” explained co-author Avner Vengosh, a professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke.
“After more than a decade of fracking operation, we now have […]
‘While there aren’t actually more homeless people than there have been in the past, the gentrification of San Francisco has had a severe effect on the homeless.’
Credit: David Levene/The Guardian
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — It’s an empirical fact: San Francisco is a crappier place to live these days. Sightings of human feces on the sidewalks are now a regular occurrence; over the past 10 years, complaints about human waste have increased 400%. People now call the city 65 times a day to report poop, and there have been 14,597 calls in 2018 alone. Last year, software engineer Jenn Wong even created a poop map of San Francisco, showing the concentration of incidents across the city. New mayor London Breed said: “There is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here.” In a revolting recent incident, a 20lb bag of fecal waste showed up on a street in the city’s Tenderloin district.
An inmate firefighter is deployed from a minimum-security prison on September 2017. Credit:David McNew/AFP
America’s prisoners are going on strike.
The demonstrations are planned to take place from August 21 to September 9, which marks the anniversary of the bloody uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York. During this time, inmates across the US plan to refuse to work and, in some cases, refuse to eat to draw attention to poor prison conditions and what many view as exploitative labor practices in American correctional facilities.
“Prisoners want to be valued as contributors to our society,” Amani Sawari, a spokesperson for the protests, told me. “Every single field and industry is affected on some level by prisons, from our license plates to the fast food that we eat to the stores that we shop at. So we really need to recognize how we are supporting the prison industrial complex through the dollars that we spend.”
Prison labor issues recently received attention in California, where inmates have been […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
