Legalectric

My friends at Xcel are miscalculating my schedule, sending the guys with the boom trucks over on a Friday without a deadline!!!  HA HA HA HA HA HA and not only that,

Yeah, give ’em the raspberries…

Today they’re taking out the poles across the street so they can start on the mother of all retaining walls.  We do now have a distribution line in the front yard.  Where’s that gauss meter?

Did you know that they saw down utility poles?  Odd, I figured they’d take them out and resuse them.  Here they’ve sawed the support pole in half, then took it down and are sawing it up into little chunks.  So small that I’ll bet they haul them over to their garbage burner here in Red Wing, or down to La Crosse where I know they burn railroad ties.  Railroad ties, penta poles, what’s the difference!

We’ve told the city that we LOVE the quiet at night, what a difference, and they were tickled that we thought they’d done something right (guess Alan and I are known around city offices).  There are deer back in da ‘hood again, one strolling down the middle of the dirt street, and somebody’s been eating the day lily buds.  We need to move some of the construction hazard lights closer.

Life goes on with construction… but work?  No way!

Not that I wanted to get back to work.  Thanks, Xcel Energy, for a reason to procrastinate… but if I’ve got a reason, it’s not procrastination, is it!

While cruising the MISO queue for wind projects in Illinois, this popped up, new MISO Queue numbers J371 and J372, 3,664 MW filed near the end of June.  Oh my…

But I don’t think it’s what it looks like.  I think they’re planning to shut them down.  There’s been a lot of buzz about it, they auctioned off the power… but didn’t, big FAIL, hence the buzz.  ???  They’re due for a report out in August, will keep an eye on the queue.

This press conference in Delaware celebrating their victory in stopping a 280 or so MW power plant flying in under the cover of a “data center” that needed maybe 1/10 of that. The University of Delaware terminated its lease agreement.

Rep. John Kowalko of Newark, Delaware — he was on this, leading the charge, and got a lot of flak for it, but persistence paid off. Kowalko is one of the few state Reps. around who represents his people with gusto!

  Press Conference Part I – Rep. Kowalko is on starting ~ 10:50

He’s also on again in Part II at 1:39, announcing a 1.2 MW solar project at the University of Delaware:

“Double Trouble” taken by Marie McNamara, rural Goodhue, MN

Recently one of the Decorah eagle fledglings was electrocuted, and its body was found after ITC noticed a fault on the line and went to check it out.

Here are various USFWS Comments on the CapX 2020 transmission line:

USFWS 2-19-08

USFWS 5-4-09

USFWS_DEISComment_4-29-11

From Iowa Public Radio:

News Buzz: Decorah eagle electrocuted

And in USA Today:

Internet famous eagle in Iowa electrocuted, dies

Power poles are attractive to raptors as high perching spots, and eagles are the most commonly electrocuted birds — 4,300 between 1960 and 1995, according to a federal study cited in a 2005 report by biologist Albert Manville. Electrocution was the fourth-leading cause of death among bald eagles, behind accidental trauma, poisoning and shooting.

… Two eagles from the Decorah nest were electrocuted in 2012.

From the Decorah Newspapers:

Another eagle electrocuted