Search results for: “amazon”
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Heh, Heh. Virginia Electricity Less Carbon-Intensive than Its Neighbors' — without RPS
by James A. Bacon The Gooze, known in more polite company as Peter G. , is a big fan of solar power and wind power and thinks we ought to have more of both in Virginia. In his most recent post, he seems particularly impressed by the activities of Amazon Web Services, which has announced plans…
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Heh, Heh. Virginia Electricity Less Carbon-Intensive than Its Neighbors’ — without RPS
by James A. Bacon The Gooze, known in more polite company as Peter G. , is a big fan of solar power and wind power and thinks we ought to have more of both in Virginia. In his most recent post, he seems particularly impressed by the activities of Amazon Web Services, which has announced plans…
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Renewable Energy: A Tale of Two Virginias
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By Peter Galuszka Call it a tale of two Virginias – at least when it comes to renewable energy. One is the state’s traditional political and business elite, including Dominion Resources and large manufacturers, the State Corporation Commission and others. They insist that the state must stick with big, base-loaded electricity generating plants like nuclear…
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Why Can't Dominion Do Big Wind Projects?
By Peter Galuszka Down in the swamplands and farmlands of northeastern North Carolina, construction has begun on a huge new wind farm that will be the largest so far in the southeastern U.S. Iberdrola Renewables LLC, a Spanish firm, has begun construction on the long-awaited $600 million project with financial help from Amazon, which also…
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Why Can’t Dominion Do Big Wind Projects?
By Peter Galuszka Down in the swamplands and farmlands of northeastern North Carolina, construction has begun on a huge new wind farm that will be the largest so far in the southeastern U.S. Iberdrola Renewables LLC, a Spanish firm, has begun construction on the long-awaited $600 million project with financial help from Amazon, which also…
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What It Takes to Power the Cloud
by James A. Bacon If it’s not one thing, it’s another. The “rural crescent” in the western reaches of Prince William County has fended off development threats from Disney’s America to four-lane highways. The latest hazard to rural tranquility: a proposed Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center and an electric transmission line to deliver electric power to…
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The Energy Paradox of Virginia-based Data Centers
by James A. Bacon There’s a fascinating paradox in the energy economics of data centers. Outsourcing data storage and computing to hyper-scale, hyper-efficient data centers allows businesses to conserve energy and consume less electricity than they would otherwise. But the outsourcing phenomenon increases demand for electricity where the data centers are clustered. Because so many state-of-the-art data centers…
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Shining Sunlight on the Accomack Solar Project
Amazon’s giant solar power plant will lighten the environmental footprint of the company’s growing cluster of Northern Virginia data centers. It won’t do much to lighten the tax burden of Accomack County.
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Don't Stop a Welcome Purge
By Peter Galuszka The Confederate Battle flag is quickly unraveling throughout the Old Dominion. With it are going many icons of an era racked with controversy and hatred, along with mythology, which regretfully will still continue in some form. Following the example of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley who asked that state’s legislature to take…
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Don’t Stop a Welcome Purge
By Peter Galuszka The Confederate Battle flag is quickly unraveling throughout the Old Dominion. With it are going many icons of an era racked with controversy and hatred, along with mythology, which regretfully will still continue in some form. Following the example of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley who asked that state’s legislature to take…
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Big Data: the New Wave of Wealth Creation
by James A. Bacon We’ve all been hearing more and more about “Big Data,” which arises from the ability of computers to collect and process unimaginably huge gobs of data and sophisticated mathematical equations to detect patterns and anomalies that can be used to drive business decision-making. Capital One used Big Data before it had a name…
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Medical Crush
by James A. Bacon One day historians will look back upon the healthcare debate in the United States and marvel at how oblivious the politicians, lobbyists and pundits were to the massively disruptive changes to come. Congress battling over Obamacare and Virginia legislators grappling over Medicaid expansion will appear to future generations like so many dinosaurs hunting…
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End Student Subsidies for College Athletics
by James A. Bacon House Majority Leader Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, is intimately acquainted with the high and rising cost of higher education in Virginia. His two oldest have graduated from Longwood University and James Madison University, and he has two high-schoolers on the way. Not surprisingly, he describes himself as “stressed and anxious” about…
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The Wacky World of Private Space Firms
By Peter Galuszka The spectacular explosion on the evening of Oct. 28 of an Orbital Sciences Corporation rocket at Wallops Island on the Eastern Shore of Virginia raises safety questions about the rush to commercialize space launches. The Antares rocket with a Cygnus cargo shipment had been bound for the International Space Station but the…
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Innovative Virginia
In his new book, “Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government,” Aneesh Chopra makes the case for using technology to transform government in the United States. Weary of the old liberal-conservative debate of more government/less government, Chopra espouses effective government. In this book, he comes across as conservative in his frank acknowledgment that government often falls…