One Day power companies will pay people to use Energy in the US

Looking forward to the day this sort of story will happen in the United States...

The 15 mile-per-hour winds that buffeted northern Germany on July 24 caused the nation’s 21,600 windmills to generate so much power that utilities such as EON AG and RWE AG (RWE) had to pay consumers to take it off the grid.


Rather than an anomaly, the event marked the 31st hour this year when power companies lost money on their electricity in the intraday market because of a torrent of supply from wind and solar parks. The phenomenon was unheard of five years ago.


With Europe’s wind and solar farms set to triple by 2020, utilities investing in new coal and gas-fired power stations no longer face stable returns. As more renewables come on line, a gas plant owned by RWE or EON that may cost $1 billion to build will be stopped more often from running at full capacity. It may only pay for itself on days like Jan. 31, when clouds and still weather pushed an hour of power on the same-day market above 162 ($220) euros a megawatt-hour after dusk, in peak demand time.


“You’re looking at a future where on a sunny day in Germany, you’ll have negative prices,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance chief solar analyst Jenny Chase said about power rates in wholesale trading. “And a lot of the other markets are heading the same way.”


Europe’s biggest power markets give preference to renewable energy including forcing some utilities to use their fossil-fuel plants less. That cuts into profit, complicating investment decisions as the companies try to meet emission targets and replace older plants and networks that Citigroup Inc. estimates will cost them more than 900 billion euros by 2020.

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RIP: Steve Jobs

Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life's setbacks -- including death itself -- at the university's 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005.

Bank of America the Dirty Business Roundup

Taxpayers have given Bank of America $25 billion in bailout funds to help jumpstart our economy, but instead the bank has misspent on executive salaries and corporate jets. Then Bank of America took even more money from cash-strapped states by not paying for workers healthcare.


Its time for Bank of America to use its taxpayer-funded windfall to support a real economic recovery and provide health care for its 247,000 workers—or give the money back.

From what we can gather, according to eye witness testimony, St. Louis PD has barricaded the Bank of America building and is refusing customer access to deposits.


Eye witness account:


'They would not let me get past that barricade, where those three guys are. I talked to the liutenant of the St. Louis Police Department - and he said they [customers?] don't have a legal right - but he was going to try to work out something, a symbolic gesture where eight people to pull out their money, I being one of them.'


He came back later and said they [BofA] will not go along with that. You will have to withdraw your money online.'

October2011 comes on the heels of OCCUPYEVERYWHERE

               
  As we see the OCCUPYWALLSTREET movement turn into OCCUPYEVERYWHERE, solidarity is building, and the 1% have taken notice. Right on the heels of this action, a separate action is set to begin tomorrow Oct. 6 in D.C. . The OCTOBER2011 Coalition is set to occupy Freedom Plaza in Washington D.C. . The pledge for those involved (yes there is a pledge) goes as follows:
                  "I pledge that if any U.S. troops, contractors, or mercenaries remain in Afghanistan on Thursday, October 6, 2011, as that occupation goes into its 11th year, I will commit to being in Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., with others on that day or the days immediately following, for as long as I can, with the intention of making it our Tahrir Square, Cairo, our Madison, Wisconsin, where we will NONVIOLENTLY resist the corporate machine by occupying Freedom Plaza to demand that America's resources be invested in human needs and environmental protection instead of war and exploitation. We can do this together. We will be the beginning."

- humanstruggle

Your Phone Company Funds Fanatics

This is an Acivist Network that offers Phone Services! That way you can get away from companies that commit dirty deeds with your money!

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is quite a zealot. She has publicly said "Wives, be submissive to your husbands." She defends her husband's Christian counseling center that tries to turn gay men into heterosexuals through prayer. She believes "intelligent design" theory should be taught in schools, and wants abortion banned even in cases of rape or incest. The list of dangerous views goes on.


And yet AT&T and Verizon Wireless both donated to Bachmann, the founder of the House Tea Party Caucus, who is now seeking the Republican presidential nomination. AT&T gave $386,000 to Bachmann and other members of the House Tea Party Caucus in 2010 and Verizon Wireless gave $35,500. Why?


It's time to make the switch to the one phone company that is fighting Bachmann's Tea Party-driven agenda. Join CREDO Mobile, America's only progressive phone company.


Through CREDO Action, our network of 2 million activists, we are countering the Tea Party agenda every day of the year. We also give a percentage of all charges — at no cost to you — to progressive nonprofits each year. Since 1985, we've raised more than $67 million for groups such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Democracy Now and Amnesty International.


So act now and get a fantastic deal—plus the satisfaction of knowing that your phone company will be fighting extremists like Michele Bachmann, not funding them.

FOLLOW LINK HERE TO CREDO MOBILE

Dirty M*therF*ckers!

The Occupy Wall Street movement spread to Chicago this week, where protesters have gathered outside the Chicago Board of Trade, the world’s oldest options and futures trading center. Like the protesters in New York and other cities around the country, the group gathered to protest our nation’s growing income inequality, as the top 1 percent of Americans continue to see their incomes rise rapidly and their tax rates fall. The Chicago traders, confronted by the protesters’ “We are the 99 percent” message, crafted their own not-so-subtle reply, hanging signs in eighth-floor windows that said, “We are the 1%“:

SOURCE LINK

The Good Old Days...

This is what the Republicans are talking about when they want to roll back regulations, wages, unions, etc etc. They call it "The Good Old Days"

FROM WIKIPEDIA

The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado on April 20, 1914.


The deaths occurred after a day-long fight between strikers and the Guard. The massacre resulted in the violent deaths of between 19 and 25 people; sources vary but all sources include two women and eleven children, asphyxiated and burned to death under a single tent.


Ludlow was the deadliest single incident in the southern Colorado Coal Strike, lasting from September 1913 through December 1914. The strike was organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against coal mining companies in Colorado. The three largest companies involved were the Rockefeller family-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I), the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company (RMF), and the Victor-American Fuel Company (VAF).

'Off-Shore' Tax Havens? THINK AGAIN! Try Wall Street

The report, called the Financial Secrecy Index, assesses 73 jurisdictions that, allow for billions of foreign dollars to be kept in offshore accounts and untaxed. About $250 billion in tax revenue is lost by governments worldwide due to offshore accounts each year, according the Tax Justice Network.


The U.S. is the fifth best tax haven according to the report and government officials may be making some headway in breaking down Switzerland's secrecy laws. In September, the U.S. government obtained the account information of American clients at 10 major Swiss banks.

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What the Frack?

Back in 2005, Congress exempted hydraulic fracturing from federal regulation via specific language tucked into the Energy Policy Act, a measure that then-Vice President Dick Cheney personally pushed through the legislative process.

See there is no regulation of this industry, Its a loophole situation that absolves companies from obeying any rules whatsoever set out by the EPA. They are completely exempt from having to do anything safely at all!

A recent study by researchers at Duke University found that the groundwater in the areas near active fracking wells contained, on average, methane concentrations 17 times higher than wells located where fracking was not taking place. Moreover, some of these wells had methane concentrations well above the “immedate action” hazard level as defined by the U.S. Department of the Interior.


And that’s not counting the environmental damage done by leaks, explosions or other incidents that result in massive spills of toxic fracking fluids, like the one that occurred in Pennsylvania last month at a well owned and operated by Chesapeake Energy.


The evidence is clear, despite what the natural gas industry and its apologists would have us believe: if you can set your tapwater on fire, there’s a problem. Fracking has enormous environmental consequences and it should have been heavily regulated — if not banned outright — from the outset.

SOURCE HERE

In 2005, the Bush/ Cheney Energy Bill exempted natural gas drilling from the Safe Drinking Water Act. It exempts companies from disclosing the chemicals used during hydraulic fracturing. Essentially, the provision took the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) off the job. It is now commonly referred to as the Halliburton Loophole.

TO FIND OUT MORE AND TAKE ACTION CLICK HERE

The attack on Women, Unions, Pell Grants, Green Energy, and Public Radio. Again.

So this is the current Big Plan from the Right aka Cheap Labor Regressives...

The bill stipulates that no more federal money could be spent on the government’s main family planning program, Title X of the Public Health Service Act, established more than 40 years ago. The program provides services to more than five million people a year at more than 4,500 clinics.


On education, the House bill would maintain the maximum Pell grant at $5,550 but restrict eligibility, barring grants to students who attend college less than half time.


Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, which represents 1,600 colleges and universities, estimated that the bill would eliminate Pell grants for a million students, or roughly 10 percent of those now eligible, while reducing the cost of the program by $3.5 billion, also 10 percent.


Since many states have increased tuition at public colleges, Mr. Hartle said, the bill would mean that “low- and middle-income families will face higher college costs with less student aid.”


With the bill, House Republicans try again, for the third time this year, to cut off federal money for NPR, the public radio network.

The House bill would also block numerous rules intended to protect workers. For example, the National Labor Relations Board could not use any money to enforce a new requirement that employers notify workers of their rights to form and join unions.


The House bill would also eliminate money for a Labor Department program that trains workers for “green jobs” in energy-efficient industries. It would virtually shut down a Labor Department office that helps communities hurt by the downturn in the auto industry.

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