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Weather: A 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly between noon and 4pm. Mostly sunny, with a high near 87. Heat index values as high as 101. West wind around 7 mph. Tonight: A 10 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms before 7pm. Mostly clear, with a low around 72. Southeast wind around 6 mph becoming light and variable after midnight.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Flagler Beach here.
- tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Palm Coast City Council meets in workshop at 9 a.m. at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
Joint workshop: Palm Coast, the county and the Sheriff’s Office hold their second joint workshop on law enforcement spending and planning, 3 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell.
Bings Landing Master Plan Public Meeting: Flagler County government hosts the 6 p.m. meeting at the Hammock Community Center, 79 Mala Compra Rd, Palm Coast, to get input on how Bings Landing should look with the upcoming relocation and expansion of Captain’s BBQ, following the county’s settlement of a breach-of-contract lawsuit Captains filed. The county is in the early data-collection phase of the plan that has been underway since late 2023. (See: “In Settlement, Flagler County Will Pay Captain’s BBQ $800,000 and Allow New, 5,000 Sq. Ft. Restaurant at Bing’s Landing,” and “County Approves Captain’s BBQ Settlement, Bringing Lawsuit’s Cost to $1 Million, and Big Changes at Bing’s Landing.”)
Book Dragons, the Kids’ Book Club at the Flagler Beach Public Library meets at 5 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
The NAACP Flagler Branch’s General Membership Meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. at the African American Cultural Society, 4422 North U.S. Highway 1, Palm Coast (just north of Whiteview Parkway). The meeting is open to the public, including non-members. To become a member, go here.
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
 Keep Their Lights On Over the Holidays: Flagler Cares, the social service non-profit celebrating its 10th anniversary, is marking the occasion with a fund-raiser to "Keep the Holiday Lights On" by encouraging people to sponsor one or more struggling household's electric bill for a month over the Christmas season. Each sponsorship amounts to $100 donation, with every cent going toward payment of a local power bill. See the donation page here. Every time another household is sponsored, a light goes on on top of a house at Flagler Cares' fundraising page. The goal of the fun-raiser, which Flagler Cares would happily exceed, is to support at least 100 families (10 households for each of the 10 years that Flagler Cares has been in existence). Flagler Cares will start taking applications for the utility fund later this month. Because of its existing programs, the organization already has procedures in place to vet people for this type of assistance, ensuring that only the needy qualify. |
Notably: The United States has not ranked among the nations most protective of press freedom for years. It is dismally, in 55th place on Reporters Without Borders’ latest ranking. Norway, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia hold the top spots. The United States is right down there with Belize, Gabon and Mauritius. “After four years of President Donald Trump’s constant denigration of the press, his successor, President Joe Biden, declared that ‘journalism is not a crime,’” Reporters Without Borders reports. “Despite this rhetoric, many of the chronic, underlying issues affecting journalists remain unaddressed, and Biden himself has come under criticism for failing to press US partners like Israel and Saudi Arabia on press freedom.” The 2024 World Press Freedom Index was released on May 3. From Statista: This year, the agency highlights a “worrying decline in support and respect for media autonomy and an increase in pressure from the state or other political actors.” This is based on the fact that, of the five indicators used to compile the ranking, it is the political indicator that has fallen most, with a global average decline of 7.6 points. Out of the 180 countries and territories analyzed, some 138 places had a majority of their respondents say that political actors in their countries were involved in disinformation or propaganda campaigns. This involvement was described as “systematic” in 31 countries. The report writers also highlight the lack of political will on an international level to enforce protection of journalists, with particular reference to the war in Gaza, which has been marked by a record number of violations against journalists and the media since October 2023. According to the report, more than 100 Palestinian reporters have now been killed by the Israel Defense Forces, including at least 22 in the course of carrying out their journalistic activities.
—P.T.
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The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
Israel ordered the local offices of Qatar’s Al Jazeera satellite news network to close Sunday, escalating a long-running feud between the broadcaster and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line government as Doha-mediated cease-fire negotiations with Hamas hang in the balance. The extraordinary order, which includes confiscating broadcast equipment, preventing the broadcast of the channel’s reports and blocking its websites, is believed to be the first time Israel has ever shuttered a foreign news outlet. Al Jazeera went off Israel’s main cable and satellite providers in the hours after the order. However, its website and multiple online streaming links still operated Sunday. The network has reported the Israeli-Hamas war nonstop since the militants’ initial cross-border attack Oct. 7 and has maintained 24-hour coverage in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s grinding ground offensive that has killed and wounded members of its own staff. While including on-the-ground reporting of the war’s casualties, its Arabic arm often publishes verbatim video statements from Hamas and other militant groups in the region.
–From an Associated Press report, May 5, 2024.
Ray W. says
This may not be directly on point, but the Washington Post reports that the Biden administration recently deregulated a long-standing requirement that any upgrade to our nation’s high-voltage power lines (grid) be subjected to a full environmental review before replacing aging and inefficient power lines. Why now? Why not before now?
Old-style high-voltage power lines, made of a steel core surrounded by an aluminum strand exterior, carry only so much electricity, else the line overheats and sags. Feeding too much electricity into a line overheats the line. Summer heat adds to the issue. Sagging power lines can spark fires, among other deleterious effects. A new-style power line, made of a carbon fiber core, surrounded by “trapezoidal” shaped aluminum wire, can be used to replace older-style power lines. The new design allows for up to a 100% increase in the amount of power flowing through the same line. According to the author, the trapezoidal style of power line was designed “a couple of decades ago.”
Some background first.
A major blockage to upgrading our power grid to add renewable forms of electricity has been an aging distribution grid. It isn’t as if we aren’t using more and more electricity each year. We have needed new lines each year for decades. The traditional way to add power flow through the grid was to build whole new lines, towers and all, land acquisition and all, a process that takes roughly 10 years to complete for just one new line. “Reconductoring”, the term engineers use to describe replacing old-style power lines with new ones, takes far less time at far less expense.
According to the article, “more than 1,500 gigawatts of power, mostly renewables, are waiting for approval to connect. (That’s more than one-third of all the power produced in the United States.)” If this is true, requiring utilities to acquire new land to build new towers, to carry more electricity, is the bottleneck. Why not simply replace all of the old-style power lines with new-style ones to double the capacity of our grid?
This new deregulation will allow for a significant increase in delivering electricity throughout the nation without having to build new towers or whole new power lines. The old-style power lines have been in use since the early 1900s. Replacing the old-style lines would allow up to 80% of the power projects waiting for approval to be built and connected to our grid, without building a single new tower, according to the author of the article. Using old towers means that a utility does not have to purchase rights of way, get approval from city and county commissions, or state regulatory agencies for that matter. Win, win, win. No palms to grease, no landowners to placate, no political grandstanding. Simply install newer, more efficient lines that don’t sag when carrying twice the power.
Why haven’t we been using these new-style power lines for the last couple of decades? According to the author, “utilities profit more from big infrastructure projects. Routine maintenance or larger-scale upgrades of the electricity grid don’t help utilities make a lot of cash compared to building new transmission lines.”
If this is true, then every presidential administration since GW Bush, and perhaps even Clinton, all the way to Trump did not take advantage of this relatively inexpensive method of increasing the capacity to deliver electricity to our homes. Each could have deregulated the process of replacing power lines. Each could have cut the price of electricity delivered to our homes. Each administration continued to require a full permitting process, including a full environmental review, just to take down an inefficient style of power line and replace it with a newer higher capacity style of power line.
We could have been receiving electricity into our homes at a lower cost for decades, yet somehow, the political structure of both parties couldn’t see their way to saving money for every consumer of electricity. Do utility companies hold that much political power in their hands? We could be so much further into the change to cheaper solar and wind power. We could be so much closer to significant cuts to our carbon output. The gullible among us might have learned the lesson that solar and wind power are but two of the many viable answers to our power needs so many years ago, through lower electricity bills.
Pogo says
@Ray W.
“…Why haven’t we been using these new-style power lines for the last couple of decades? According to the author, “utilities profit more from big infrastructure projects. Routine maintenance or larger-scale upgrades of the electricity grid don’t help utilities make a lot of cash compared to building new transmission lines.”…”
Maybe this played a part:
“…Local Forces That Helped Shape Gingrich…”
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/12/us/the-local-forces-that-helped-shape-gingrich-as-a-foe-of-regulation.html
Ray W. says
Another article about transmission lines upgrade reports that Chattanooga’s electric utility spent $280 million to improve the delivery efficiency of its grid, using in part what was described as “smart technology”, including software that permits remote rerouting of electricity, which enables a quicker response time to electronic outages. The company estimates that the $280 million investment resulted in savings to customers and related economic growth totaling $2.7 billion over the first 10 years of use.
Another utility company, MISO, or Midcontinent Independent System Operator, is spending $10.3 billion for grid upgrades; it anticipates an impact from added economic output plus transmission line savings totaling $37.3 billion to 45 million people who receive electricity through its transmission lines, due to transporting “cheaper, more reliable power.” No time frame was reported for the savings to occur. But it took 11 years for MISO to obtain regulatory approval for its transmission upgrades, and its “next series of approvals has been delayed.”
In 2013, 3,000 miles of new transmission line projects were completed. Last year, 251 miles. Joe Rand, with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told the reporter that the nation’s grid is “40, 50, 60 years old.” He added this about the slow pace of upgrades: “It’s institutional, regulatory, and social issues.” To him, the technology exists and the economics support improvements to the grid; they just aren’t occurring very fast.
The Trump administration imposed a moratorium on new offshore wind farm development that lasted two years, delaying every offshore wind project that had previously been permitted and stopping the permitting of new projects.
To be fair, the article reflects that many other renewable projects await connection to the aging grid, not just offshore wind farms. At the end of 2023, renewable projects that are already producing electricity, totaling 930 gigawatts of power — enough to meet the needs of 171 million homes — are in queue to be connected to the grid.
The author, however, makes no mention of economic efficiencies from installing the new generation of power lines that I detail in the above comment.
The premise of the article is that our national grid needs some 10,100 miles of new transmission lines to service the extra electricity we are already generating. As my previous comment addressed, it is estimated that 80% of the electricity produced by completed renewable energy projects awaiting permission to connect to our grid can be efficiently and more cheaply transmitted to consumers by installing new-style lines on existing transmission towers, without having to build new towers and lines.
We all appear to be paying much more than we need to pay for our electricity, and decades of presidential administrations have delayed implementation of the new technologies.
Let’s think this through.
Steel innovators have proved that steel can be manufactured more cheaply through use of electricity, instead of using coal or natural gas. Steel production is an energy intense process. If steel companies could produce steel more cheaply via the new method, then our steel industry would be more competitive and profitable were it to switch to electricity-based manufacturing, but no company would invest the money to switch to the new process if it can’t rely on an aging transmission grid.
During the Shale Revolution, when so much natural gas was added to our national supply, energy prices plummeted for manufacturers in energy-intense sectors. Appliance manufacturing needs a tremendous amount of energy. Due to abundant supplies of natural gas, many U.S. appliance manufacturers began reopening appliance manufacturing plants in the U.S. about 20 years ago; they had been shut down in the 90s when manufacturing shifted to China. At that time, only specialty appliance makers continued to manufacture their products in the U.S. Now, a significant percentage of all appliances we buy are made right here.
Manufacturing jobs rose during the Obama administration due to the cheap energy, which offset employee cost differences with China and Korea. We simply became more competitive with the rest of the world. The overall manufacturing sector continued to expand during the Trump and Biden administrations. Cheap electricity can aid in continuing the growth. We had ceded the appliance manufacturing field to China and Korea. We are taking some of the losses back.
Pogo says
@FWIW
As stated
https://www.google.com/search?q=What+is+Captain+Ahab+syndrome
Additionally
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Ahab
Pogo says
@Cop takes time out from brutalizing heroic protesters
https://www.news-journalonline.com/story/news/local/2024/05/28/alachua-florida-police-officer-saves-kitten-cat-highway/73877924007/
Pogo says
@In these times
March 28, 2024
Reading the Constitution
Former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer explained his judicial philosophy and approach to the U.S. Constitution, summed up in his book’s subtitle, “Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism.” The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia hosted this event.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?534438-1/reading-constitution
Pogo says
@FWIW
As stated
https://www.google.com/search?q=research+writing