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NOVEMBER 2013
“Our Mission: Gallup Solar is collaborating with communities, elected representatives, utilities and industry to bring solar power to all peoples in our area”
Weekly Wednesday Meetings are from 6-8 p.m.
at 113 East Logan Ave., Gallup, NM
Refreshments are served
The public is welcome and all input is valued.
For more information call our new cell number:
505-728-9246
November 6, 6-8pm
Adrian Manygoats on Eagle Energy Entrepreneurship Program
November 13, 6-8pm
Developing Annual Goals/Objectives I
November 20, 6-8pm
Developing Annual Goals/Objectives II
November 27, 6-8pm
Gallup Solar Board Meeting
OTHER NOVEMBER EVENTS
WHERE GALLUP SOLAR WILL BE
November 1
Central High Career Conversations
November 16
Gallup Celebrates America Recycles Day
10 am - 2 pm, Gallup Community Service Center
Across from the Jim Harlin Community Pantry
November 21
Red Rock Elementary Science Fair
MUzine
A news feature about ways’n means of
Municipal Utilities following up on the first MUzine presented last month as part of an ongoing campaign to keep informed about towns like Gallup with MU’s.
More about the municipal utility of
San Marcos TX
In addition to a user friendly website,City of San Marcos, it offers and conducts free home energy audits providing energy efficiency and renewable energy recommendations.
It has a rebate program for qualifying energy efficient appliances and weatherization retrofits.
It recommends and promotes solar installations. Customers apply online and choose among a list of certified contractors. After the installation she submits application with invoices for a $2.5/watt solar rebate up to $5000 not to exceed 50% of the system cost.
San Marcos does not have a huge MU as it serves only about twice as many customers as GJU. So how does it fund these programs? Very simply, through its rates which are among the lowest in Texas and are comparable to GJU's.
There were many consequences from the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island PA in March 1978. In addition to a reduction of uranium mining in our state, a planned nuclear power plant in Prewitt was cancelled in favor of the Escalante coal plant, above, and the amazingly efficient Bio-Pappel cardboard recycling paper mill.
In my old
Riverside CA
this shocking event gave rise to citizen awareness and action in opposing the purchase of a part of the San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station (SONGS) by Riverside’s MU (RPU). The organizing activities of our local Alliance for Survival chapter spawned another group, Citizen’s United for Renewable Energy (CURE). Though RPU stayed determined and eventually made this purchase, the broad coalition led by CURE captured the passions of the community in demanding that Riverside go green. Thus over these many years, RPU has gone green implementing the full range of sustainability programs. And for many reasons SONGS will no longer be singing its polluting tune, and RPU is beginning to divest from coal plants.
San Onofre - closed down forever!
It must be noted that Riverside has 15 times the population of Gallup. And just as GJU sends part of the profits from the sale of electricity to the city coffers, so does RPU. Now however RPU promotes electric vehicles, recycling, reduced emissions, home and commercial energy efficiency and renewable energy and generates some of its power from renewable sources. Homeowners have even depleted this year’s funding for solar rebates. The current total PV production stands at 6MW. Extensive information can be explored at RPU’s website,
Green Riverside.
Don Hyde, proud of Riverside!
TIME, LIKE AN EVER
ROLLING STREAM,
BEARS ALL ITS SONS AWAY
And so will climate change. Said poetically, it’s almost comforting. That the build up of CO2 in the atmosphere will be the death knell for civilization is not usually the acknowledged problem, just the chaos that each weather event brings for peoples so unprepared for any change in the diurnal round.
Every day we use coal-fired electricity for lights, heat, cooking, the fridge, TV, computers, cell phones, and go, transported by the miracle of burning fossil fuels to bigger spaces heated, lit and
energized the same way.
All with the concomitant, slow, inevitable, mammoth build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere. Quietly, magnificently, except for the chaos
that will inevitably ensue.
A year ago today, Governor Cuomo, handsome in his work shirt, in the New York subway, as the waters rose, acknowledged climate change. Obama mentioned it once or twice, too.
newsday photo
We tend to think pompously of safety on the High Desert, a term which I would never apply to our region that I see as beautiful permaculture struggling to recover from severe drought.
Pooh, we are already in the midst of it.
Solar power can completely reverse the effects of climate change because it creates no carbon dioxide. That is why Gallup Solar stands by with its foot in the door of a new future.
You say how can a few PV panels, heating units and outhouse lights make a difference? You are right. They are just feet in the door.
We burned wood and whale oil before the extractive industries figured out how to mine the planet of its hidden oil, coal, uranium and waters. How to make a pipe, a pump, how to frack and crack are technologies normally beyond our ken as we mindlessly turn switches on without any understanding of the infrastructure and money behind it all.
Solar plants that cover the Sahara to power all of Europe and the
Middle East will be. And they will be in McKinley County, too.
But the technology is going to be just as expensive as the fossil fuel start-up. And no doubt the same magnates will own it all.
So Gallup Solar just keeps it foot in the door, perhaps needlessly, because Solar is going to happen anyway. We keep our foot in the door hoping it will happen soon enough.
For more: http://ncronline.org/node/62721/
Look for our Youthmade Gallup Solar Sun
in December!
And for past issues and more go to gallupsolar.org
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