Free Republic

By commissioning expensive and inefficient wind and solar electric generating facilities, India may have dug the grave of its own efforts to save the critically endangered great Indian bustard. Erected to avert a faux climate crisis, the so-called renewable machines and their attendant transmission lines are helping to drive one of Earth’s largest flying birds to the brink of extinction. Avian aficionados such as myself have long bemoaned prioritizing wind and solar technologies at the expense of endangered species. Yet, the relentless push for needless climate solutions seems to ignore this as “green energy” installations and avian fatalities increase in...

We recently reported that the County of Maui sued Hawaiian Electric for allegedly causing the deadly wildfires that swept through West Maui and completely destroyed the town of Lahaina. Now Hawaiian Electric is pointing the finger back at the County of Maui. It asserts it had de-energized powerlines ahead of a second wildfire that broke out on the island in the afternoon. The utility said power lines toppled by high winds likely caused the morning brush fire in Lahaina but electricity had been off for hours when a second fire occurred that afternoon. Hawaiian Electric’s stock soared more than 40%...

Xcel Energy’s new $1.7 billion Power Pathway Project to build 550 miles of new 345-kilovolt power lines and at least four new substations in eastern and southeastern Colorado will add to the cost of renewable energy. Xcel customers will be paying for the power lines to help meet Gov. Jared Polis’ Greenhouse Gas Reduction Roadmap goals for carbon reduction. ... for nearly full electrification of buildings and transportation, Net-Zero America co-principal investigator Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor and energy systems engineer at Princeton, told The Denver Gazette in an email that the U.S. would have to increase transmission capacity by...

More than a million customers across Lousiana are without power on Tuesday morning. Some reports indicate it could take weeks for the lights to come back on as thousands of miles of transmission lines were damaged after Hurricane Ida rolled through on Sunday. The Category 4 hurricane raises fresh questions about how well New Orleans and other coastal areas across Lousiana are prepared for natural disasters. As of 0630 ET, PowerOutage.US reports a little more than one million customers are without power across the state’s coastal plain. Energy provider Entergy Corp has been surveying the damage since Monday and has...

Authorities in Utah are sounding the alarm about a weird and worrisome trend wherein people hammock atop power lines. The Weber County Sheriff's Office made note of the unnerving fad in a Facebook post last week, explaining that they have seen a troubling increase in thrill-seekers attempting to pull off the far-from-relaxing feat. The department shared a photo showing two such individuals ascending a power line tower with one of the climbers having already reached a rather nerve-wracking height.

Four people died and one person was in critical condition after a hot air balloon they were riding in hit power lines in New Mexico’s largest city, police said Saturday. The crash happened around 7 a.m. on Albuquerque’s west side, police spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said. No identities have been released but fire officials said two males, including the pilot, and two females died. The multi-colored balloon skirted the top of the power lines, sending at least one dangling and knocking out power to more than 13,000 homes, Gallegos said.

Trizer Mwakinya, head of communications at the Kenya Wildlife Service, said Monday that workers from the Kenya Power and Lighting Company “were on site” to rectify the problem. But conservationist Paula Kahumbu in tweets addressed to the power company and the wildlife agency said the power lines have been killing giraffes, vultures and flamingos. Close to 1,400 Rothschild’s giraffes remain in the wild in the world and according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature the species is not considered endangered anymore but is now in the near-threatened category.

LA GRANDE, Ore.—In this small town in eastern Oregon, renewable energy is widely popular. But the power lines needed to transmit it aren’t. La Grande is one of many communities nationwide fighting against transmission lines being built to keep up with a surge in clean-power generation. “We need to develop more renewable energy, of course, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of damage to our last remaining wild places,” Brian Kelly, who helps lead a green group in the area, said of a proposed transmission line that would run through the nearby forest. Utilities are under pressure to put...

“California’s reliance on hydropower and proliferation of remote, centralized renewable energy plants; the mandated environmental mothballing of 19 coastal natural gas power plants located close to customers; redundant transmission lines for green power; and seasonal wind blasts, results in lethal blast-furnace-like wildfires that leave trees alone but incinerate houses.” “California leaders and opinion-makers must first abandon their blame game and diagnose the problem more clearly than using clichés like ‘global warming,’ ‘Donald Trump,’ ‘greed’ or even ‘not enough clear cutting,’ if they are going to responsibly deal with the dangerous unintended consequences of de-modernizing its electric grid.”

Going solar isn’t necessarily any protection from California’s new “planned” power outages, and local residents and businesses are enduring a lot more than just a few inconveniences. Bloomberg’s Chris Martin has a story on California’s troubles with one of my favorite headlines ever: “Californians Learning That Solar Panels Don't Work in Blackouts.” Apparently, many of California’s would-be Earth-savers had no idea that just putting solar panels on their roofs doesn’t mean they’ll have power when PG&E switches it off. As Martin explains:

PALM BEACH COUNTY, FL (Gray News) - A 35-year-old Florida man lost his life Saturday while trying to retrieve a pigeon he cared for from a power line. Deputies from the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office found Elian Garcia-Rivera around 3 p.m. They told The Palm Beach Post he used a 20-foot aluminum pool pole to try and move his bird, but accidentally touched the live power line. The shock threw him to the ground between a large pigeon coop and a fence. Paramedics transported him to a local hospital where he passed away. "There are no words to say,"...

A wildfire sparked by a turkey vulture that caught fire after shorting out two power lines according to a witness burned parts of an RV and two properties in Martinez Tuesday morning, causing an estimated $80,000 in damage, a fire official said. Firefighters responded at 10:42 a.m. to the vegetation fire in the 800 block of Howe Road, Contra Costa County Fire Protection District Fire Inspector Steve Aubert said. The witness told KPIX 5’s Don Ford that he saw the large turkey vulture short out between two power lines. When the bird began to burn, it started the brush fire....

The cause of an early morning fire north of San Diego was an electrocuted bird falling from an active power lineA bird carrying a snake in its talons struck power lines north of San Diego, sparking a hillside fire just west of The Merge. San Diego Police arrived to the location on Dunhill Street near the intersection of Interstates 5 and 805 just before 6 a.m. Flames were burning very close to businesses including the General Atomics building, officials said. Officers called in San Diego Fire-Rescue crews who contained the fire within an hour. Fire officials initially told NBC 7...

SNIPPET: "A federal grand jury has issued an eight-count indictment against a central Arkansas man accused of damaging electric cooperative and other power facilities. Jason Woodring, 37, was indicted on charges relating to sabotage of high-voltage power lines and power stations earlier this year in several cities. Among them: a terrorist attack against a railroad carrier and destruction of energy facilities, including a 115,000-volt transmission line owned by First Electric Cooperative in Jacksonville. Woodring faces up to 20 years in prison on the energy facility destruction charges, and life in prison if convicted on the terrorism charge. According to an...

SAN JACINTO (CBSLA.com) — Authorities say a paraglider was killed Sunday after striking some live power lines in San Jacinto. The accident occurred Sunday afternoon before 1:40 p.m., according to officials. The unidentified paraglider was in a remote mountainside area of Riverside County — near Soboba Road — at the time of the accident. Riverside County Fire spokeswoman Jody Hagemann said a rescue helicopter flew to the paraglider’s rescue but he died of his injuries.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards discovered an electronic monitoring device near the Fordow nuclear site in northern Iran last month, The Sunday Times reported Sunday, citing western intelligence sources. Soldiers were checking on communications terminals at Fordow when they discovered a rock, according to the report. When the soldiers attempted to move the rock, it exploded, presumably self-destructing. The device was reportedly capable of intercepting data from computers in Fordow. The Iranians did not report the discovery, according to the Times. Iran uses the Fordow facility to enrich uranium to a fissile concentration of 20 percent, the part of its work...

WASHINGTON (AP) - In the aftermath of storms that knocked out power to millions, sweltering residents and elected officials are demanding to know why it's taking so long to restring power lines and why they're not more resilient in the first place. The answer, it turns out, is complicated: Above-ground lines are vulnerable to lashing winds and falling trees, but relocating them underground incurs huge costs - as much as $15 million per mile of buried line - and that gets passed onto consumers.

To aesthetes, high-voltage power lines are a blight on the rural landscape. But zoologists at the University of Duisburg–Essen in Germany welcome them as a tool for testing the power of large ruminants to perceive Earth's magnetic field. Last year, a team led by Hynek Burda and Sabine Begall discovered that free-ranging cattle and deer tend to align their bodies in a north–south direction. The animals sure seemed to be responding to the geomagnetic field. If so, the zoologists reasoned, they should lose their orientation when they graze or rest near power lines, because the current passing in the lines...

A consortium of private investors that sought to build high-voltage electricity transmission lines to carry power from renewable sources upstate to New York City said on Friday that it was suspending its efforts. The consortium, New York Regional Interconnect, cited a ruling made on Tuesday by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington upholding a review process that demands that each such project be subject to a cost-benefit analysis and receive the support of 80 percent of the beneficiaries. Regional Interconnect said it interpreted the decision as giving its main competitor, Con Edison, which purchases almost all of the electricity...

Want Green Jobs? Cut the Green Tape By Karen Harbert We hear a lot today about generating green jobs along with green power and fuel. But as Congress just passed a stimulus package with tens of billions of dollars in spending for clean energy and infrastructure projects, we have to ask ourselves what are the odds these projects will go forward when existing projects are being stymied. The fact is, our energy sector suffers from a lengthy, unpredictable, and needlessly complex regulatory maze that delays, if not halts entirely, construction of new energy infrastructure. Federal and state environmental statutes-such as...