Tag: infrastructure

What Happened to Internet for All?

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaigned on a promise to connect Americans to high-speed internet. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act set aside $42.5 billion to the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. “What we’re doing is, as I said, not unlike what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did when he brought electricity to nearly every American home and farm in our nation. Today Kamala and I are making an equally historic investment to connect everyone in America to high speed internet, and affordable high speed internet, by 2030,” Biden stated. To date, no one has been connected to the internet under this program.

Biden is correct that he has acted like Roosevelt insofar as creating countless social programs and encouraging Americans to become dependent on the welfare state.  The $42.5 billion actually rises to $90 billion when we factor in the Affordable Connectivity Program. Kamala Harris was tasked with overseeing the Internet for All initiative, but she has done absolutely nothing to help the program progress. “While Republicans in Congress have refused to help us revive this program, our Administration is refusing to let them stop us from delivering for families across America,” Harris stated this past June.

Harris believes she could solve the problem if endless funds were made available. She did nothing with the initial investment and continues to ask for more funding despite having nothing to show for the BILLIONS invested in these Build Back Better programs. We recently saw the same fiasco with FEMA misplacing billions, claiming its budget toppled, and then blaming the Republicans for not blindly handing them more funding.

Harris consistently factors in race to her social programs and has supported the Digital Equity Plan than will prioritize internet access to minorities first. Divide and conquer.

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More Bad News For Ukraine: 90% Of It’s Thermal Power Capacity Is GONE

Prime Minister Denis Shmigal has said that almost all of Ukraine’s thermal power generation capabilities have been destroyed by Russian long-range strikes. Shmigal added that the country must now rely on substitutes.

The news continues to get worse for Ukraine as we head toward winter.

The prime minister added that Kyiv’s priority is to provide these regions with alternative sources of heat and electricity, noting that Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, has received dozens of energy equipment units, including powerful electricity generators.

While writing on Telegram on Tuesday, Shmigal said Kiev is doing its best to increase energy sustainability, especially in frontline regions and areas bordering Russia. He added that “cities that depend on large thermal power plants are especially vulnerable,” given that Russia “purposefully attacked” these types of facilities, “destroying or damaging almost 90% of all thermal power generation” in the country.

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America Is Falling Apart: Our National Priorities Are in Dire Need of Restructuring

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”—Bob Dylan

A water main breaks every two minutes somewhere in the U.S., resulting in contaminated drinking supplies and boil water notices.

One out of three bridges in the U.S. needs repair, endangering hundreds of millions of commuters. More than 42,000 bridges across the country, carrying about 167 million vehicles each day, are in disrepair.

It is estimated that 300 million people could face power outages across the United States between 2024 and 2028, due in large part to widespread power grid failures.

No wonder U.S. infrastructure received a C- on the Infrastructure Report Card.

America is falling apart.

Collapsing bridges, buckling roads, overheated railways, deteriorating power lines, contaminated water lines, outdated public transportation, overtaxed power grids, aging ports and waterways, unsafe tunnels and highways, and spotty or insufficient telecommunications assets are all becoming frequent hallmarks of the American way of life.

If the nation is woefully unprepared to deal with climate disasters such as floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts, despite the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars that have been pledged to shore up the nation’s infrastructure problems, it is because politicians across the political spectrum have failed us.

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene makes this failure by the government to put the needs of the American people first painfully evident. Entire towns are under water. Roadways have collapsed or are otherwise impassable. Potable water is scarce. More than 1.5 million households are still without power.

Clearly, our national priorities need to be re-examined.

While the politicians play partisan games with our tax dollars, the nation’s critical infrastructure—both the physical foundations of the nation and the figurative foundations of our freedoms—continues to be neglected and deprioritized in favor of grandstanding, bloated military budgets on endless wars abroad, foreign aid to shore up the infrastructure and military defenses of international allies, and all manner of graft and pork barrel spending.

When all is said and done, the bread-and-circus distractions and sleight-of-hand political theater being trotted out in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms adds nothing of real value to the lives of the average American.

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UK’s National Grid Admits It Doesn’t Have A Clue How To Reach Net Zero

A few weeks ago, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and his Head of Mission Control, Chris Stark wrote a public letter to Fintan Slye of the National Grid ESO asking for practical advice on how to deliver a clean power grid by 2030.

The letter asked Slye to set out a range of pathways to enable a decarbonised power system by 2030. For each pathway they asked for the forecast energy generation and demand mix and the underlying assumptions that need to be met for these to be deliverable. They also asked for the key requirements for the transmission network and interconnectors and for a high-level assessment of the costs, benefits, opportunities, challenges and risks as well as the key actions to be taken by Government, NESO, Ofgem and industry to enable delivery of the pathways.

Recently, Fintan Slye took to X to announce his initial response. Strangely Slye’s letter is not addressed to Miliband or Stark, but takes the form of an open letter to industry.

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Senators open inquiry into Kamala Harris’ failure to deliver $42b internet program promised to rural Americans

Nine senators have opened an inquiry into Kamala Harris’s failure to deliver on her promises as the country’s “broadband czar.”

At the heart of the inquiry is a $42.45 billion program aimed at providing rural America with high-speed internet. Despite this significant investment, the program has not connected a single individual to the internet after more than 1,000 days.

FCC commissioner Brendan Carr has been expressing his concerns about this major failure on X and recently shared a new letter penned by nine senators about the mismanagement of this program under Harris.

The letter begins by outlining her failure and comparing it to her massive failures as border czar, noting: “It appears that your performance as “broadband czar” has mirrored your performance as “border czar,” marked by poor management and a lack of effectiveness despite significant federal broadband investments and your promises to deliver broadband to rural areas.”

It explains how under the Infrastructure Investment and JOBS Act, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration was given $42.45 billion to carry out the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment program, also known as BEAD, to bring broadband access to rural areas and to other unserved communities.

The letter cites Harris’s promise that “we can bring broadband to rural America today” and points out that three years later, not a single individual in these communities has received this connectivity.

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WWIII: Ukraine Strikes Infrastructure Targets Deep Inside Russia Overnight, Including Mosocw, Tver

Ukraine launched multiple drone strikes overnight on 01 September 2024, targeting critical infrastructure in Russia, including power plants and a refinery in the Moscow and Tver regions.

According to Russian authorities, explosions and blazes were reported at the Moscow Oil Refinery, the Konakovo Power Station (Tver Region). An unsuccessful attempt was also made to attack the Kashira power plant.

Russia’s Defence Ministry claimed that 158 drones were destroyed across several regions, including Moscow, Tver, Kursk, Bryansk, Voronezh, Belgorod, Kaluga, and Lipetsk. No casualties were reported.

This escalation follows Ukraine’s increased use of drone technology to strike at Russian infrastructure, with Kyiv seeking U.S. approval to use Western-supplied weapons more extensively inside Russia.

A retaliatory response from Moscow is expected following these drone strikes across Russia.

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Harris -Walz are oblivious that the U.S. economy CAN NOT exist without crude oil.

“Renewables” such as wind turbines and solar panels ONLY exist to generate occasional electricity under favorable weather conditions, as they CANNOT make tires, toilet paper, iPhones, or any products or transportation fuels to support lifestyles and economies around the world!

Neither VP Kamala Harris nor Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are cognizant that all the parts of spacecrafts, EV’s, and for more than 50,000 merchant ships, more than 20,000 commercial aircraft  more than  50,000 military aircraft , 23,000 private planes, and 33 million pleasure boats are made from the products based on derivatives manufactured from crude oil.

In addition, all those merchant ships, commercial and military aircraft, private planes, and pleasure boats, use transportation fuels manufactured from crude oil. 

FURTHER, everything that NEEDS electricity to function, like iPhones, iPads, TV’s, computers, data centers, and X-Ray machines are made from the oil derivatives manufactured from raw crude oil.

It’s shocking that neither Harris nor Walz comprehend that electricity was developed AFTER the discovery of crude oil. Without the parts and components to be able to generate electricity such as insulation, copper wiring, computers, control panels, and air conditioning, there would be no electricity from any of the six methods used to generate electricity such as coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar.

Amazingly, neither Harris nor Walz have enough Energy Literacy to direct policymakers to write energy policies!

Policymakers have no comprehension that crude oil is virtually never used to generate electricity, but when manufactured into those petrochemicals that are the basis of more than 6,000 products, is the basis for virtually all the products that support Hospitals, Medical equipment, Appliances, Electronics, Telecommunications, Heating and Ventilating, and Communications systems.

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AI Black Swan: Power Prices Skyrocket On East And West Coasts

Marylanders and residents in surrounding states should brace for rising power bills due to capacity constraints on the regional power grid and the increasing peak load from new AI data centers (read: here). This combination creates a perfect storm of continued utility bill inflation, which will only pressure cash-strapped households in the years ahead.

On Friday, Goldman published a note about Tuesday’s PJM Interconnection power capacity auction for the 2025-26 planning year (June 1st, 2025, to May 31st, 2026). The note revealed a massive surge in capacity prices:

“The price across the RTO (see map below) was $269.92/MW- day. This is more than an 800 percent increase from the most recent auction (which cleared at $28.92/MW-day), and also a new record (the previous high was $174.11/MW-day for the 2010- 2011 planning year).”

“In addition to procuring the required capacity across the PJM RTO region, PJM’s auction also sets targets for specific zones or LDAs (Locational Deliverability Areas) based on transmission limitations. The auction failed to procure the required level of capacity in two zones (Dominion or “DOM” and Baltimore Gas and Electric or “BGE “) which cleared at the applicable caps of $444.26/MW-day (DOM) and $466.35/MW-day (BGE). PJM has not yet published the extent of the shortfall in the two zones.”

The critical point from the report:

“After a series of auction delays and relatively low clears (see chart below), PJM capacity prices appear to have finally caught up with the generative AI data center load growth story that has been central to parts of PJM.”

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Another Kamala Harris Failure: After Three Years and Billions of Dollars, Rural High Speed Internet Plan Has Connected ZERO People

Border Czar Kamala Harris, who failed miserably protecting our borders, was tapped to lead another component of the Biden-Harris agenda, connecting rural Americans to high-speed internet.

The program was launched in 2021 at a cost of $42 billion to American taxpayers.

President Biden put VP Harris in charge of the effort, and after 985 days under her leadership, NOT ONE person has been connected, and zero Americans have benefitted from this boondoggle.

Brendan Carr, who serves as Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, shared the abject failure of the Biden-Harris plan, which broadband infrastructure builders have said is “wired to fail.”

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Danger: Artificial Intelligence Data Centers Are Overwhelming The Global Electrical Grid

The artificial intelligence boom has had such a profound effect on big tech companies that their energy consumption, and with it their carbon emissions, have surged.

The spectacular success of large language models such as ChatGPT has helped fuel this growth in energy demand. At 2.9 watt-hours per ChatGPT request, AI queries require about 10 times the electricity of traditional Google queries, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit research firm. Emerging AI capabilities such as audio and video generation are likely to add to this energy demand.

The energy needs of AI are shifting the calculus of energy companies. They’re now exploring previously untenable options, such as restarting a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant that has been dormant since the infamous disaster in 1979.

Data centers have had continuous growth for decades, but the magnitude of growth in the still-young era of large language models has been exceptional. AI requires a lot more computational and data storage resources than the pre-AI rate of data center growth could provide.Data storage has becoming an increasingly concerning problem for electrical grids over the years. With the fast rise of artificial intelligence and its demands, experts warn many grids are already near capacity.

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