Adaptation. Mitigation. Justice.
San Antonio is one of the last large cities in the United States to get serious about climate change. But a plan now being developed is wide-ranging and potentially very serious indeed. More than 70 volunteers (PDF) in San Antonio have been appointed to help officials with the City of […]
With ‘Dirty’ Deely’s retirement nearing, San Antonio’s CPS Energy hosting a hearing on keeping Spruce burning past 2040. Greg Harman SAN ANTONIO—Lumbering through the Earth Day throngs at Woodlawn Lake in April, the soot-stained “coal monster” pleaded his case. Here were booths about solar energy, tables with native plants, and […]
CPS Energy’s “Flexible Generation Plan” anticipates the city will still be burning coal in 2042. I hope when I’m gone and the ages shall roll, My body will blacken and turn into coal. Then I’ll look from the door of my heavenly home, And pity the miner a-diggin’ my bones. […]
Greg Harman An explosion at a San Antonio power plant this week either bolstered the utility’s case for rate hikes to keep up with infrastructure maintenance demands or those of some critics who say the aged J.T. Deely coal plant — scheduled for decommissioning ahead of schedule in 2018 — […]
Upcoming and imminent events related to the sustainable path in San Antonio… Tonight: Public hearing on CPS Energy’s proposed rate hike The first in what is likely to be a series of rate hikes in San Antonio by CPS Energy gets an airing at a public hearing tonight. Here’s CPS […]
I haven’t had time to follow up with Elena Craft (right), health scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund’s Austin office, who served to keep a recent air-quality panel at San Antonio’s Rackspace on point about certain local and state-level policy failings responsible for fouling our shared respirable resource. I had intended to reach […]
When CPS Energy, San Antonio’s publicly-owned utility, mailed out letters to the owners of solar-sporting homes in early April announcing that it was considering a program that would cut payments for sun-derived energy nearly in half – from 9.7 cents per kilowatt hour to roughly 5.6 cents – residents were […]
San Antonio’s standing nationally on the clean-tech scene could be better. But for a newcomer on the scene being ranked 42 among U.S. cities is still commendable, according to Bryce Yonker, director of business development at Clean Edge. “The places that are at the top have been at this for […]
San Antonio (and Houston, and Dallas, and Austin) have made important strides in building increasingly sustainable cities rich in low-polluting clean-tech technologies and developing carbon-reduction strategies. San Antonio’s CPS Energy and Austin’s Austin Energy continue to lead nationally in green-power sales, for instance, and important weatherization efforts, electric-vehicle charging stations, […]
Municipally owned Texas utilities Austin Energy and CPS Energy still have some of the most robust renewable energy profiles in the nation, according to a survey by the U.S. Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). NREL’s annual Utility Green Power Leaders survey for 2012 ranks Austin second for total amount of […]
A conversation with John Farrell, director of the Energy Self-Reliant States and Communities program at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. San Antonio’s publicly owned utility, CPS Energy, recently argued in favor of ending net-metering on the grounds that upper-income solar owners were saddling low-income residents with an unfair share of […]
In the slow-motion planetary train wreck that is fossil-fuel-derived climate disruption — whether you call it global warming, global ‘weirding,’ or a worldwide conspiracy of the labcoat class — no one factor ranks higher in the blame game than coal. Once burned, the dark rock we level mountains for releases […]