Robert Kennedy Jr. investor in Citizenre

It has come to GNB's attention that Robert Kennedy Jr. is largely invested in Citizenre, a company currently under fire for being nothing more than a photovoltaic pyramid scheme.

What Citizenre has done through lavish marketing and network of representatives, is enlist over 5000 people to become solar sales affiliates on their website, without ever selling a single solar panel to anyone.

This would be a beautiful thing if it were not for the fact, after a year of being online, solliciting investment capital, and building their affiliates network, they have yet to acquire and sell a single solar panel to anyone, anywhere in the country, and investors are getting antsy.

It's a wonderful dream, selling PVs to your neighbors, installing solar one house at a time. Problem is many independent solar dealers around the country are doing that already, establishing ground rules and territory, and Citizenre stands to upset the growth of these small companies, who are starting to make real headway into the first adopter market of affluent suburbs.

Citizenre has expressed plans to open a photovoltaic factory in New York state. But many fear this is just talk, as there has been no physical evidence of this taking place, considering the cheapest and best panels are coming from China. How do they propose to reverse the trend of outsourcing electronics manufacture to Asia?

For Kennedy Jr. to stand making a return on his investment with Citizenre, the company also needs to have a very good relationship with the utilities, who in New York are refusing to lift the netmetering cap, meaning nobody right now in the state can get money back for the electricity they send back into the grid. Sierra Club is fighting this limit in Albany. The Utility refuses to compensate for your meter running backwards, that's because they saw the writing on the wall... as PVs get cheaper, and easier to install, what the heck do we need the Utilities for? All we need is the grid. Something Barry Commoner predicted would happen in his book The Politics of Energy back in 1980.

So maybe the reason Robert is so silent about his opposition to the relicensing of Indian Point is because he doesn't want to tick off Entergy anymore than he has to, in light of the money he stands to make if Citizenre does succeed in penetrating the residential PV market in a substantial way. Green energy afterall now means solar, wind and nuclear in the minds of the brainwashed public!

Yesterday Robert was revealed as a co-signer on the NUKE FREE website as a co-signer opposing nuclear industry loan guarantees. Maybe it's time he also made his solar energy interest known, so folks can undertstand what he understands, that if Indian Point closes, it's going to mean a boom in solar electricity installation, whether Citizenre turns out to be for real or not. Except Robert wants somebody else to get his hands dirty, so he can come up smelling roses, in case Indian Point gets its new license. Politicians! All the same!

Right now to many journalists Citizenre is beginning to look more and more like a stock scam... so if Robert got himself wrapped up in this, he may not want it to become public knowledge. But we here at GNB are all about full disclosure and putting our cards on the table. So how about it Robert, what's YOUR grand master plan to shut down Indian Point? Or don't you care anymore, as long as you can make a profit from monopolizing residential solar installations in the state?

A powerful anti-nuclear movement is growing again

Why is Uncle Sam so Committed to Nuclear Power?
By Peter Montague of Rachel’s Democracy & Health News

Excerpts:

Can investors be fooled twice? Financially, the nuclear power industry has never stood on its own two feet without a crutch from Uncle Sam. Indeed, the nuclear power industry is entirely a creature of the federal government; it was created out of whole cloth by the feds in the 1950s. At that time, investors were enticed by offers of free money — multi-billion-dollar subsidies, rapid write-offs, special limits on liability, and federal loan guarantees. Despite all this special help, by the 1970s the industry was in a shambles. The British magazine, the Economist, recently described it this way: “Billions were spent bailing out lossmaking nuclear-power companies. The industry became a byword for mendacity, secrecy and profligacy with taxpayers’ money. For two decades neither governments nor bankers wanted to touch it.”

+++

To grease the skids for a nuclear revival, the most important change the NRC has made has been to creatively redefine the meaning of the word “construction.” This change was enacted in April, 2007, with lightning speed — six months from initial proposal to final adoption. By way of comparison, it took the NRC eleven years to adopt regulations requiring drug testing for nuclear plant operators.

“Construction” has traditionally included all the activities undertaken to build a nuclear power plant, starting with site selection, evaluation, testing and preparation, construction of peripheral facilities like cooling towers, and so on. Even the earliest stages of siting are crucially important with a facility as complex and dangerous as a nuclear power plant.

In April of this year, the NRC officially redefined “construction” to include only construction of the reactor itself — excluding site selection, evaluation, testing and preparation, construction of peripheral facilities and all the rest. At the time, one senior environmental manager inside NRC complained in an email that NRC’s redefinition of “construction” would exclude from NRC regulation “probably 90 percent of the true environmental impacts of construction.” Under the new rules, by the time the NRC gets involved, a company will have invested perhaps a hundred million dollars. Will NRC commissioners have the backbone to toss that investment into the toilet if they eventually find something wrong with the site? Or will they roll over for the industry and compromise safety?

The lawyer who dreamed up the redefinition of “construction” is James Curtiss, himself a former NRC commissioner who now sits on the board of directors of the nuclear power giant, Constellation Energy Group. This revolving door pathway from NRC to industry is well-worn.

One NRC commissioner who voted in April to change the definition of construction is Jeffrey Merrifield. Before he left the NRC in July, Mr. Merrifield’s last assignment as an NRC commissioner was to chair an agency task force on ways to accelerate licensing.

In April, while he was urging his colleagues at NRC to redefine “construction,” Mr. Merrifield was actively seeking a top management position within the nuclear industry. In July he became senior vice president for Shaw Group, a nuclear builder that has worked on 95% of all existing U.S. nuclear plants. Mr. Merrifield’s salary at NRC was $154,600. Bloomberg reports that, “In Shaw Group’s industry peer group, $705,409 is the median compensation for a senior vice president.”

No one in government or the industry seems the least bit embarrassed by any of this. It’s just the way it is. Indeed, Mr. Merrifield points out that, while he was an NRC commissioner providing very substantial benefits to the nuclear industry by his decisions, his concurrent search for a job within the regulated industry was approved by the NRC’s Office of General Counsel and its Inspector General. From this, one might conclude that Mr. Merrifield played by all the rules and did nothing wrong. Or one might conclude that venality and corruption reach into the highest levels of the NRC. Or one might conclude that after NRC commissioners have completed their assignment inside government, everyone in the agency just naturally feels they are entitled to a lifetime of lavish reward from the industry on whose behalf they have labored so diligently.

+++

... investors should think twice before buying into the “nuclear renaissance” because there’s another “renaissance” under way as well: A powerful anti-nuclear movement is growing again and they will toss your billions into the toilet without hesitation. Indeed, with glee.

Read the entire article here:
Celsias

LEDs lights to span the Hudson River

25 Sep 2007

LEDs will replace conventional lighting on the George Washington bridge and the Holland Tunnel.

According to an article on the Star-Ledger news website, two Hudson River crossings linking New Jersey and New York City will be fitted with LED lights.

The plans to retrofit conventional lamps with energy-saving LED illumination on the George Washington bridge and the Holland Tunnel were approved by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's board of commissioners.

A $4.5 million project eventually will replace more than 4,200 fluorescent fixtures at the Holland Tunnel with 1,736 LED fixtures. The new lamps will last 15 years, compared with the roughly 18-month life span of the existing lights, providing an estimated annual saving of $340,000, says the article.

The George Washington bridge will see a one-for-one replacement of 156 mercury vapor lamps on the bridge's cables. The $200,000 project will results in annual savings of $50,000.

The current fixtures, which provide aesthetics and do not light the roadway, must be replaced as often as each year. Agency officials also are considering converting the roadway lights, says the newspaper article.

Both projects are annually expected to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 3.3 million pounds and nitrogen oxides by 5,000 pounds. Work on the bridge and the tunnel is slated to start and finish in 2008.

Article courtesy LED magazine

Entergy, all pretty in green!

Wow, what a relief, I can sleep so much better at night now... They don't credit the illustrator in this report... I'd like to find out who it is, just so I can ask him, or her, how it felt cashing in the check.

Of course, no mention in the text of the $300 million Entergy received from the Federal government last year to clean up their mess in New Orleans... or the billions of tax payers money spent managing their waste... maintaining security on their uranium supply chain, or the damage still imposed on Native American communities... As long as the drawings are cute... who cares? Right?

Gee, we're like so looking forward this bright green nuclear renaissance, with Al Gore and Robert Kennedy Jr. leading the way climbing over the Hollywood prop barricades... For after all... the enemy is oil and coal now... nuclear is our friend again... and Indian Point is so pretty in the moonlight... watching over the Hudson... the fish are happy, the water is clean... the radiation is invisible... the teamsters will watch after you... make the pain of cancer and still births go away... the lies, the deception, the rotten to the core corporate culture, the suits who don't care, just follow the letter of the law... here's our sustainability report... we're part of the community, we care... we're part of a conspiracy that has kept electron production out of the hands of the people, so we can stay fat on the hog, and spend lavishly on pretty PR campaigns to sway children and naive, gullible saps!

Entergy, wow... wow o wow... too cheap to meter... cause all the costs are hidden... delegated to the next generation... Sherwood's been away, a family emergency, he better get back to his blog soon, otherwise I may indeed write or say something there's no turning back from... we police each other... we both have a different set of "don't go there..." but this report... THIS report... really makes me want to scream... because it's so freakin' 1980 greenwash... it's like they don't even have a decent PR team... they are so clueless as to the "real" mood of the country... which is good, which is very good, because this thing will only go to make people angrier... angrier than they already are... at this plant, which persists, which everybody wants gone, which just hangs on and on... with their useless sirens and incompetent staff... a comedy of errors which I hope to God won't lead to something we can't walk away from... and according to this report... everything's just fine... you can sleep at night, we have it all under control, we're your friends... we just make lots and lots of $$$ for a sliver of billionaires... while for half as much, a tenth perhaps, we'd have PVs on every roof!

Wake up people... if Kennedy Jr. there is serious about this barricades stuff... well he better start putting his money where his mouth is and join us, because I really don't see him climb over anything without his handlers cell phoning him it's OK, the press is there, be ready for your media close up...

http://www.entergy.com/content/our_community/pdfs/sustainability_report_06.pdf

Hard copy of the report can be obtained from:

Media Relations office
504-576-4238
http://www.entergy.com/our_community/environment.aspx

Publicly Available Reporting

ANNUAL REPORTS TO SHAREHOLDERS, PROXY STATEMENTS
http://entergy.com/investor_relations/annual_publications.aspx

INVESTOR GUIDES
http://entergy.com/investor_relations/annual_publications.aspx

GREENHOUSE GAS PROGRESS REPORTS
http://entergy.com/our_community/environmental_reports.aspx

CONTRIBUTIONS AND OTHER SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY INITIATIVES
http://entergy.com/our_community

LOW-INCOME INITIATIVE
http://entergy.com/our_community/low_income.aspx

THE MOST IMPORTANT CUSTOMER
www.eei.org/magazine/editorial_content/nonav_stories/2002-09-01-customer.htm

ON THE BRINK: THE HOME ENERGY AFFORDABILITY GAP
http://entergy-neworleans.com/global/our_community/advocate/GAP.pdf

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IMPACT OF HOME ENERGY ASSISTANCE
http://entergy-neworleans.com/global/our_community/advocate/colton_assistance.pdf

THE ECONOMICS OF EDUCATION - PUBLIC BENEFITS OF HIGH-QUALITYPRESCHOOL EDUCATION FOR LOW-INCOME CHILDREN
http://entergy-neworleans.com/global/our_community/advocate/education_book.pdf

SUSTAINABILITY REPORT
http://Sentergy.com/our_community/environment.aspx

GLOBAL SULLIVAN PRINCIPLES
www.thesullivanfoundation.org/gsp

Corporate Environment and Safety Contacts
Gary Serio, Vice President - Safety & EnvironmentTelephone:
504-576-4585 Facsimile: 504-576-2316
E-mail: gserio@entergy.com

Patricia S. Hoppe, Director - Corporate Safety
Telephone: 504-576-5510 Facsimile: 504-576-2316
E-mail: phoppe@entergy.com

Brent Dorsey, Director - Corporate Environmental Programs
Telephone: 504-576-5084 Facsimile: 504-576-2316
E-mail: bdorsey@entergy.com

Social Responsibility and Low-Income Initiative Contacts
Kay Kelley Arnold, Vice President - Public Affairs
Telephone: 501-377-3553 Facsimile: 501-377-3558
E-mail: karnold@entergy.com

Patty Riddlebarger, Director - Corporate Social Responsibility
Telephone: 504-576-6116 Facsimile: 504-576-2190
E-mail: driddl1@entergy.com

Public and Media Inquiries
Arthur E.F.Wiese, Jr., Vice President - Corporate Communications
Telephone: 202-530-7325 Facsimile: 202-530-7350
E-mail: awiese@entergy.com

NY Electrical Utilities Stalls Growth of Independent Electron Producers!

According to Melissa Everett, the Sustainable Hudson Valley organization rarely steps into the complex world of policy, but right now they are doing that.

The solar energy industry in Central Hudson’s territory – the mid-Hudson Valley – needs our support. Here’s the story. There has been a “cap” on the amount of solar-powered electricity that customers can sell back into the grid – so-called “net metering,” and that cap has been reached.

Sustainable Hudson Valley and the New York Solar Energy Industry Association have petitioned to the Public Service Commission for an increase to that cap, from 1.2 megawatts to 3.0 MW.

Right now, at a moment of fast-growing interest in solar, interested homeowners are being told that they simply cannot recover their investment by spinning their meter backwards – a big problem. Legislation is moving through the New York State Assembly to raise the net metering cap much more, so this situation is especially damaging and ironic.

Central Hudson – which received the “Utility of the Year” Award from NYSEIA for its responsible dealings with the renewable energy industry – has indicated that they will not oppose this administrative proceeding, but support is needed to make sure the matter moves smoothly through the regulatory process.

Melissa is sending out a copy of the letter sent to the PSC by Sustainable Hudson Valley. If you agree that this issue is timely and important, please take a moment – now – to contact Melissa and ask her what you can do to help.

Melissa Everett, Ph.D.
melissae@earthlink.net
Executive Director
Sustainable Hudson Valley
PO Box 4112
Kingston, NY 12401
845-331-2670
http://www.sustainhv.org