With some weird weather already in the books this month, Mother Nature may have one last hurrah in store for Northern California before summer officially ends.
A wave of thunderstorms passed over northeast California and near Reno on Tuesday afternoon, with the National Weather Service’s Reno office sharing a photo of what appears to be light snow on the Mt. Rose Highway at an elevation of about 8,500 feet.
Residential graywater offers up a huge potential for our city to offset potable water use. When the next drought rolls around, and it will, we could be sitting pretty with healthy trees and landscapes using less water from the Sierra than we do now.
How could we accomplish this? The answer is graywater, defined in California as the discharge from laundry wash water, showers, and bathroom sinks.
Yesterday, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to approve a power purchase agreement (PPA) with 8minute Solar Energy for a solar power plus energy storage facility located in Kern County, California. Now that the LADWP commission has approved the project, it will move to a vote with the Los Angeles City Council before it can be delivered to the Mayor’s desk for a final signature. The project’s guaranteed commercial operation date is December 31, 2023 – about 12 years after it was initially filed in early 2012.
The state legislature has approved a proposal from Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, aimed at helping the state manage its water.
“Stream gages provide important information in this era of droughts and flooding, driven in part by climate change,” Dodd said. “This bill is an important step toward managing our water for the long run. You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
After months of back and forth with Chevron over a series of uncontrolled crude petroleum releases in a Kern County oil field, state regulators are demanding new information about its operations in the spill area.
California’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, or DOGGR, issued a formal directive to the San Ramon-based company Tuesday, requiring the firm to provide a wealth of technical data on its petroleum extraction practices in the Cymric oil field.
A proposal to save Carlsbad’s 400-foot-tall coastal smokestack found little support Monday when presented to the city’s Historical Preservation Commission.
“It’s interesting that people want to save something that we have been fighting for years to remove,” said Commissioner Laurie Boone. “We are going to work with (the power company) NRG to build something beautiful and new there.”
A proposal to save Carlsbad’s 400-foot-tall coastal smokestack found little support Monday when presented to the city’s Historical Preservation Commission.
“It’s interesting that people want to save something that we have been fighting for years to remove,” said Commissioner Laurie Boone. “We are going to work with (the power company) NRG to build something beautiful and new there.”
Just a few days after it was revealed that emergency state legislation is being prepared to save the city’s massive Pure Water project from being derailed over a fight over union-friendly agreements, it looks like similar labor fights could upend local cities’ plans to form a government-run energy utility.
The San Diego City Council Tuesday unanimously approved an update to the Mission Valley Community Plan that calls for increased mixed-use development that is pedestrian-friendly and helps residents make better use of public transit.
The update will be applied to the original community plan, which the council first approved in 1985 and has amended more than 20 times since. According to city officials, the update was necessitated to plan for future growth in the area and bring the Mission Valley plan into compliance with the city’s current General Plan and its Climate Action Plan.
An ominous warm patch similar to the notorious “blob ” that wreaked havoc along the California coast five years ago has been detected along the West Coast, raising fears among scientists that the fragile ocean ecosystem may be facing another calamity.
A large marine heat wave has warmed the northern Pacific Ocean and is threatening to disrupt sea life from Alaska to Southern California, marine biologists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
