The Texas Town That Just Quit Fossil Fuels

shop deals on amazon
eggtimer rocketry
rocket sok
The Rocketry Forum

Help Support The Rocketry Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
At least with nuclear the amount of waste is not that big compared to coal, and can easily be locked away in a secure facility. Coal wastes are released into the environment.
 
taiwanluthiers said:
At least with nuclear the amount of waste is not that big compared to coal, and can easily be locked away in a secure facility. Coal wastes are released into the environment.
Click to expand...

The problem seems to be that no one wants to take that waste. And you have to keep it locked up and secure for 10,000 years. And then there's things like 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. I'm sure nuclear will be a big part of our energy future, but it has its own set of serious challenges.
 
o1d_dude said:
Srsly? A guy from one of the two Blue cities in Texas tells me to trust Bloomberg? Isn't that the same super nanny-statist formerly Mayor of NYC? The same guy behind #IllegalMayors, #MomsDemandAction, and #EverytownForGunSafety, Initiative 594 in Washington state, and now pouring money into Arizona and Nevada to push gun control legislation there, too?

You keep your advice.

I hear Austin is only 15 minutes from Texas in any direction.
Click to expand...
o1d_dude, you got me pegged wrong. My mailing address may be Austin, TX, but I don't live within the city limits. I don't even live in the same county that contains most of Austin. I listen to conservative talk radio on WOAI when I'm driving, and watch Fox News when I get home at night.

However, even though I'm a conservative I do keep an open mind about renewable energy. I've thought about getting solar panels for my house a few times, but I never liked the idea of having to wait 7 years to break even on the costs. The sun shines over a Kilo-Watt of power per square meter on the earth, and it's so enticing to take advantage of that. However, solar cells are only have about 15% efficiency and the cost is quite high. The efficiency is improving, and the costs are dropping, so at some point solar power will become an obvious choice.

BTW, if you don't like Bloomberg you can read the article from some other source. Here's a link to the local Fox TV channel here -- https://www.myfoxaustin.com/story/28565841/georgetown-goes-green-with-energy-efforts .
 
Last edited:
Let’s just hope that the good people of Georgetown TX down get all high-and-mighty because they, due to a set of circumstances very few towns or cities could emulate, have managed to achieve this goal of having all their electricity provided by “Renewable” energy sources.

All that would have to happen for that achievement to go up in smoke would be for some sizable industry to move into their town.
I’d like to see an auto assembly plant get all of its electricity from solar or wind.

For that matter; are they REALLY getting all of their electricity from renewable?
Probably not; all electricity goes onto a single grid; there’s not one grid for renewable energy and one for all the others.
So all that this town has actually done is get a piece of paper which says that their electricity is from solar/wind and that’s all they have a piece of paper. It’s kind of like having a deed saying you own a piece of the Moon; for unless the turbines or solar panels are sitting within Georgetown’s city limits with everything in the city directly wired into them the actual electricity they use comes from any and all sources as available.


ThirstyBarbarian said:
That is a very serious issue, and what's going to happen is that all the agriculture in the state is going to collapse. It seems to me that the current "plan" is to hope and pray for rain. And when the rain doesn't come, which it won't, then the water is going to be cut from the only place it can be. Residential water use only accounts for 20% of the water used in the state. Agriculture uses 80%.

This issue is a bit off-topic, except for the fact that water scarcity played a part in Georgetown's decision too.
Click to expand...
As a native son of Southern California I’ve heard/read that 20/80 water use ratio virtually all my life and I’m not sure I really believe it.
33 million people somehow use vastly less water than the a few hundred farmers and ranchers?
And yes I read where it takes a bazillion gallons of water to grow one almond tree and I don’t buy that either. I personally think that agri-business is being used as a scapegoat for the silliness of having 33 million people living in what is for the most part, desert.

And then there is Las Vegas NV.
 
Last edited:
So why does farms use so much water? I mean it's not like they're farming rice (which must be planted in a wet patty so uses LOTS of water). Also do they really have to use drinking water to irrigate crops, couldn't they just divert rivers or just pump water from bodies of water as long as it's not salt water?

I do know lawns use a lot of water and perhaps something could be done about that.
 
I hope that the Georgetown experiment with these so-called Green Energy experiments is successful. However, being the habitual skeptic that I am, I can't help but wonder if this program will turn out to be just another hoax similar to the "red light camera scams" promoted throughout Texas as a boon to public safety with the only real "green" involved being the color of the money changing hands. It's also ironic that while we can't discuss "politics" on this forum the decision to embark on this noble experiment was in fact a political decision by the Georgetown City Council and its interim City Manager.

Can we discuss "smoke filled rooms"?
 
Continuing the water off-shoot, I don't have any idea how much it really turns out to be, but I will say that one of the fields I launch at in CA had a neighboring field being irrigated during a launch, and I had to go around that field to recover a rocket[*], and it was amazing to me just how much water was being dumped on that field. It was probably an 8" (perhaps even 12") main just gushing water for hours. And that was for a single ~80 acre (1300x2600 ft per Google Earth) alfalfa field, this farm has dozens of those, and this isn't even for direct human consumption, it's to feed dairy cows. Now I'm not sure it was actually fresh water either, it sure smelled terrible coming out of the pipe. But it was still a LOT of water from my PoV. No idea how often they irrigate each field, they were thoroughly saturating this one so perhaps that lasts a while, the surrounding fields seemed to be bone-dry but in the CA sun that probably happens in a few days.

Heck, I'll say that my own water consumption is probably largely due to watering my lawn and gardens, my water usage is much higher during the "brown" season than the "green" season (since my area only has two seasons). It may not be 20/80, but probably at least 40/60. Last year given our area's drought I hardly watered at all and had the brown lawn to show it, I've been considering replacing it with an artificial lawn recently since it doesn't look like things are going to get any better (and while the grass did terribly, the weeds really took over in my back yard :p ).


[*] Actually, if I had been smart I would have gone around it. In reality I slogged through it, ending up covered up to my knees in mud, holding my socks and shoes which each weighed about 10 lbs with all the mud they picked up before they got pulled off my feet. Turned out my rocket blew past that field onto the next dry one (good for the rocket), which was like razor blades at that point walking on the hard, cracked, dry ground with bare feet (bad for me).
 
Waste not, want not. How much electricity is being consumed by office buildings to keep them illuminated all night? How much water is being consumed to keep the lawns in north Dallas emerald green all year? How much non-renewable fuel is consumed by automobiles being driven to launch sites?

nightime earth.jpg
 
taiwanluthiers said:
At least with nuclear the amount of waste is not that big compared to coal, and can easily be locked away in a secure facility. Coal wastes are released into the environment.
Click to expand...

And THAT is exactly the problem. There is no "secure facility" in which to store radioactive waste. Every nuclear facility in the US has about 30 years worth of spent fuel rods, etc. (using far beyond the designed or intended storage space) in the hope (and promise) that the federal government would create a place for it. But after 30 years of construction and many billions of dollars, just as the facility was nearing completion and being readied to accept shipments, the federal government cut all funding and is in the process of decommissioning and closing it. So we now have zero places to store what we have already created and will have none for at least another 30 years. And that assumes that they start construction today, which, obviously, they won't since no additional construction is planned. As it stands, if I understand correctly, every operating nuke plant is currently in violation of their storage limits on their federal licensing, and should technically be shut down today for those violations. But since the federal government is basically responsible for that violation in the first place, they are (at least currently) willing to "overlook" the storage violations even though those storage areas are a ridiculously easy terrorist target.

In any case, nukes have a very serious, and very complicated, environmental problem that isn't going away any time soon.
 
That's a political problem, not a technical problem. Nuclear power creates so little waste that all the nuclear facility in the nation could send all the waste to one facility that would be locked away and sealed to prevent access. But then the Federal government refused to do anything about it.
 
taiwanluthiers said:
That's a political problem, not a technical problem. Nuclear power creates so little waste that all the nuclear facility in the nation could send all the waste to one facility that would be locked away and sealed to prevent access. But then the Federal government refused to do anything about it.
Click to expand...

Not so little.

Yucca Mountain had a lifetime limit of 63,000 metric tons (62,000 long tons; 69,000 short tons). Current estimates are that as of last year (2014) the 104 reactors in the US have already produced this much spent fuel that is awaiting long term storage.

Reprocessing spent fuel rods could reduce this some, but the US does not currently license breeder reactors, so technically, I don't think that we even have the capability to do so, nor do we have any plans to get us there in the next 30 - 50 years.

Storage is a huge environmental problem.
 
Then it looks like we are going to be buring coal and nat gas for a long long time then.
 
Perhaps a bit off topic yet still dealing with environmental issues is the concern over starvation. I figure it's a geo/political matter. The majority of the third world countries have poor soil conditions due to natural and man made actions. The animals, (especially the elephants) are leaving what little is left of the forests and rummaging through the farmers fields decimating entire crops. On the political side, financial aid is often diverted through to the upper echelon of the government by crooked politicians. We're familiar with those people, aren't we.
 
taiwanluthiers said:
Well that's also another political problem. They could reprocess fuels but they won't.
Click to expand...

True. I'm not sure about the technical or environmental problems associated with breeder reactors. I know that the first breeder reactor in the world was operated in Detroit, Michigan not long after the Manhattan Project but was decommissioned, it's liquid sodium cooling system allowed to cool and go solid and then decommissioned and dismantled only in recent years (if they have ever found the funding to do it at all).

I also know that the French use breeder reactors. But again, I have no idea what the technical or environmental hurdles are.

What I do know is that 63,000 tons of poorly stored, radioactive waste is a gigantic environmental problem. Until you find a political solution to that particular environmental problem, it wouldn't seem to make much sense to make a whole bunch more.
 
taiwanluthiers said:
So why does farms use so much water? I mean it's not like they're farming rice (which must be planted in a wet patty so uses LOTS of water). Also do they really have to use drinking water to irrigate crops, couldn't they just divert rivers or just pump water from bodies of water as long as it's not salt water?

I do know lawns use a lot of water and perhaps something could be done about that.
Click to expand...

It's just the sheer scale of the farming is so huge. You should see it sometime. Drive the Interstate 5 from the Tehachapi mountain range up the central valley to Sacramento and then on up almost to the oregon border. It is hundred of miles of nothing but farms. I have no idea what the acreage is, but I would guess it is literally thousands of square miles under irrigation. And this state does not get rain in the summer. We have a Mediterranean climate, and that means a wet season and a dry one. And during the dry one, there really is almost no rain at all.

The rivers have been diverted. The bodies of fresh water have been tapped. Even the ground water has been pumped for decades at rates that are not sustainable so that the water table keeps dropping and even the land has sunk in some places.

Lawns do take a lot of water and are not an appropriate landscaping feature for this climate and should be done away with. That would help, but it is not going to be enough, and a lot of people are resistant to giving up lawns. And it's nothing compared to the scale of the farming.
 
woferry said:
Continuing the water off-shoot, I don't have any idea how much it really turns out to be, but I will say that one of the fields I launch at in CA had a neighboring field being irrigated during a launch, and I had to go around that field to recover a rocket
[*], and it was amazing to me just how much water was being dumped on that field. It was probably an 8" (perhaps even 12") main just gushing water for hours. And that was for a single ~80 acre (1300x2600 ft per Google Earth) alfalfa field, this farm has dozens of those, and this isn't even for direct human consumption, it's to feed dairy cows. Now I'm not sure it was actually fresh water either, it sure smelled terrible coming out of the pipe. But it was still a LOT of water from my PoV. No idea how often they irrigate each field, they were thoroughly saturating this one so perhaps that lasts a while, the surrounding fields seemed to be bone-dry but in the CA sun that probably happens in a few days.

Heck, I'll say that my own water consumption is probably largely due to watering my lawn and gardens, my water usage is much higher during the "brown" season than the "green" season (since my area only has two seasons). It may not be 20/80, but probably at least 40/60. Last year given our area's drought I hardly watered at all and had the brown lawn to show it, I've been considering replacing it with an artificial lawn recently since it doesn't look like things are going to get any better (and while the grass did terribly, the weeds really took over in my back yard :p ).

[*] Actually, if I had been smart I would have gone around it. In reality I slogged through it, ending up covered up to my knees in mud, holding my socks and shoes which each weighed about 10 lbs with all the mud they picked up before they got pulled off my feet. Turned out my rocket blew past that field onto the next dry one (good for the rocket), which was like razor blades at that point walking on the hard, cracked, dry ground with bare feet (bad for me).
Click to expand...

TCC site near Helm? I landed in the bog twice! That was some of the nastiest stick mud i have ever been in!
 
ThirstyBarbarian said:
Here is an interesting article about a town in Texas that runs it's own utility by making long-term contracts (20 years or so) for purchasing electrical power at set rates. Most recently they've signed contracts for renewable wind and solar power and will soon be getting all their electrical power from sources other than coal or other fossil fuels.

Their reasons for making the switch were not environmental or altruistic in any way. They did it because it was the best deal they could get, and they will be saving significant money over the next several decades. In addition, these renewable energy sources save a ton of water over traditional power plants, and water is becoming more and more scarce in Texas and throughout the Southwest, so that was another factor in the decision.

I though it was interesting that the need to save on expensive and scarce water, plus the fact that the cost of renewables keeps dropping as more of it is installed, means that this town will see such savings by switching.

https://www.slate.com/articles/busi...hy_the_town_is_dropping_fossil_fuels_for.html
Click to expand...

I'm not sure why some folks think this is so unusual. The big power companies make long term contacts all the time. They buy power as cheaply as possible and sell it for as much as they can charge for it. If you are a home owner, or a small business, unless your state or local government has consumer choice laws or a municipal power company, you are stuck with whatever your local power company charges.

The highest power prices in the country are in New England. If you can get a discount you are paying $0.16-$0.18 per kw-hr. Some states have consumer choice laws that allow you to choose who you purchase your power from which allows you to save a few cent per kw-hr. If you are very lucky, your city or town has a municipal power company that makes bulk purchases and owns and maintains the distribution system within the municipality so your power and distribution costs are minimal.

The latter approach works because the municipal power company gets the best deals for their taxpaying citizens and not outside stockholders. The big boys don't like it, but the municipal power subscribers are happy and get much better service and prices because all dealings are local.

Bob
 
taiwanluthiers said:
So why does farms use so much water? I mean it's not like they're farming rice (which must be planted in a wet patty so uses LOTS of water). Also do they really have to use drinking water to irrigate crops, couldn't they just divert rivers or just pump water from bodies of water as long as it's not salt water?

I do know lawns use a lot of water and perhaps something could be done about that.
Click to expand...

I just looked up the acreage. California has 25.3 million acres of farms. That's 40,000 square miles! The state is the country's top agricultural region and has been for 50 years. Half of the country's fruits and vegetables are produced here. It takes a LOT of water!
 
bobkrech said:
I'm not sure why some folks think this is so unusual. The big power companies make long term contacts all the time. They buy power as cheaply as possible and sell it for as much as they can charge for it. If you are a home owner, or a small business, unless your state or local government has consumer choice laws or a municipal power company, you are stuck with whatever your local power company charges.
Click to expand...

Ah, I miss my old home town of Fairport,NY. Electric cost $4/mo + 3.6cents per kw/hr. Rates still the same today. Municipal utility buying hydro power from NYS.
 
I just read that so far this year, Costa Rica has generated 100% of its electrical power from renewables, mostly hydroelectric, and the rest from wind, solar, biomass and geothermal energy. Seventy-five days into the new year, the country has used no fossil fuels at all for electrical power generation yet.
 
Hydroelectrics require that you be located near a dam or a river where you can build the dam. It's not nearly as environmentally neutral as we think because it tends to disrupt ecosystems. I do know the US has one of the most navigable waterways in the world, however they are important for commerce so if you dam them up, you destroy their value as transport links. I'm sure you can get lots of energy damming up the Mississippi River though... you just won't be able to move goods through it.

Also places like Africa has to be careful damming up rivers, because they often flow into neighboring countries. One way to piss off neighboring countries is by damming up the river cutting off their water supply.
 
taiwanluthiers said:
Hydroelectrics require that you be located near a dam or a river where you can build the dam. It's not nearly as environmentally neutral as we think because it tends to disrupt ecosystems. I do know the US has one of the most navigable waterways in the world, however they are important for commerce so if you dam them up, you destroy their value as transport links. I'm sure you can get lots of energy damming up the Mississippi River though... you just won't be able to move goods through it.

Also places like Africa has to be careful damming up rivers, because they often flow into neighboring countries. One way to piss off neighboring countries is by damming up the river cutting off their water supply.
Click to expand...

Costa Rica has a lot of advantages when it comes to renewable energy in that it gets a lot of rain and has steep mountainous terrain, which is great for hydroelectric power. They also have a lot of volcanoes, which is good terrain for geothermal. There's no reason to think that most countries could accomplish what they have done, but it is still interesting and ties in well with the topic of the thread.
 
America has lots of advantages when it comes to nuclear energy too, lots of remote places to dispose of wastes, as well as being in control of nuclear materials in the first place... if only the government could get past all the politics.
 
I do know the US has one of the most navigable waterways in the world, however they are important for commerce so if you dam them up, you destroy their value as transport links.
Click to expand...

As long as you put in locks at your dams, you can easily maintain the transport links. The Upper Mississippi and Columbia Rivers both have several dams and both are heavily trafficked by barges. A large fraction of the grain grown in Eastern Washington ends up on barges going down the Columbia. In some ways, having the dams makes it easier to navigate, since water levels tend to be more predictable. I don't know if the Mississippi dams generate power, but the Columbia ones certainly do. Grand Coulee alone has a capacity of 6.8 GW (2-3 very large coal plants), and also diverts water for agriculture.

The environmental costs of dams are significant, as you pointed out. Two hydro dams on the Elwha River out here were recently taken out. They needed a major overhaul, which would have been expensive, and they also had no fish passage. That blocked out salmon from most of the river.
 
taiwanluthiers said:
America has lots of advantages when it comes to nuclear energy too, lots of remote places to dispose of wastes, as well as being in control of nuclear materials in the first place... if only the government could get past all the politics.
Click to expand...


Ironically, in this case, it has been the government that (until recently) has kept the project moving forward. The people who have been trying to kill the entire project at Yucca Mountain have been the same environmentalists that want us to stop using hydrocarbons.
 
So I guess they want us to go back to the Stone Age? I don't think renewables can eliminate fossil fuel use, only reduce it
 
Many years ago I worked one summer as an intern at a Electric Power generating station for NYC and learned a lot (including that it is VERY HOT working over the furnaces in the summer!). One thing that I was impressed with was the amount of efficiency worked into the system as well as the measures taken to clean the pollutants. When you have one big heavily regulated power supplier supplying power to a major city, it becomes very efficient, reliable (some would argue against this one), safer and cleaner than most other means.

While I do think that new tech is the way to go, I believe it is best to not rush or force it and to allow the market to decide upon it. Sorta like the electric/solar car from the 80's...big failure. Pushing tech before it's really ready can be very expensive and sometimes a waste of resources which could have been directed towards improving current systems. Just my opinion.

Aside from that "seriousy stuff"...how about figuring out a power generating system using rocket motors? They're biodegradeable, have a lot of stored energy and everyone I know here uses them. Rocket powered tour boats? Rocket powered water pumps? Rocket hooked up to a turbine generator charging up a capacitor? :D
 
taiwanluthiers said:
So I guess they want us to go back to the Stone Age? I don't think renewables can eliminate fossil fuel use, only reduce it
Click to expand...

They can do a lot. In orbit, solar lasts (essentially) forever. The Japanese are on the right track. Orbiting power stations can generate 24/7 and you don't have any worries about how big they are except for the footprint of the receivers (which is huge at this point). But even then, until they figure out elevators, solar can't get things to orbit from the ground.
 

Similar threads

C
Hydrogen not as fuel
2
Replies
55
Views
2K
Peartree
Peartree
dr wogz
Hydro-electric power (and other non-fossil fuel generation methods) discussion
2
Replies
55
Views
2K
Funkworks
Funkworks
M
perchlorate in h20
Replies
2
Views
607
mkeene
M
Elapid
Fliskits Fireside Chat Transcript
Replies
4
Views
2K
jetra2
jetra2

Latest posts

Back
Top