Latest news with #DCR
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
FERC ALJ order threatens competitive transmission cost caps: CAISO
This story was originally published on Utility Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Utility Dive newsletter. An order by a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission administrative law judge threatens cost caps included in competitive transmission solicitations across the United States, according to the California Independent System Operator. A May 22 ruling by FERC ALJ Joel deJesus could also upend FERC's framework for providing refunds to electricity customers when the agency finds a company has been overcollecting revenue, CAISO said in a filing with the commission on Tuesday. The California grid operator urged FERC to overturn deJesus' findings, saying they 'will harm ratepayers, undercut the consumer protections afforded by the Federal Power Act …, and cast doubt on the CAISO's and customers' ability to rely on voluntary, binding cost caps proposed and agreed to by project sponsors in competitive transmission planning processes.' The issue centers on a dispute over a proposal by a Lotus Infrastructure Partners affiliate to recover more than double a cost cap for the 500-kV Ten West Link transmission project between California and Arizona. CAISO selected the DCR Transmission project in 2014 following a solicitation that grew out of its transmission planning process. The transmission line started operating a year ago. DCR in June 2023 asked FERC to approve a transmission tariff based on a $553.3 million estimated project cost compared to a $259 million binding cost cap. Three months later, FERC accepted DCR's proposal, subject to refund, but ordered hearings and settlement procedures, according to CAISO. The proceeding was moving under the Federal Power Act's section 205, according to CAISO. However, deJesus said FERC's initial order was 'ambiguous' as to what FPA section the case should advance under. He contends FERC should have determined that the DCR rate filing was an 'initial rate filing' to be handled under section 206 of the FPA and that FERC should have established a refund date under that part of the law. In his order, deJesus noted that in section 205 filings, the burden of proof for the justness of a rate falls on the applicant — while in section 206 cases, the burden is on the entity challenging a utility's rate. DeJesus plans to move forward with the case under the FPA's section 206, unless FERC acts on appeals to his decision by June 6. Parties appealing the ALJ's order include CAISO, FERC staff, the Electricity Transmission Competition Coalition and a group that includes the California Public Utilities Commission. Recommended Reading CAISO asks FERC to reject Starwood affilate's request to blow past transmission cost cap Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Hindustan Times
2 days ago
- General
- Hindustan Times
Practice what you preach, BMC told, on SWM draft bye-laws
MUMBAI: 'Practice what you preach' is one of the messages for the civic administration, which has invited suggestions and objections to its draft Municipal Solid Waste (Management & Handling) Cleanliness and Sanitation Bye-Laws 2025. With only two to go before the deadline to submit them, HT asked experts and activists to weigh in on the proposed bye-laws. Some also questioned how waste collection and segregation would be carried out in slums, while others focused on the missing role of informal waste pickers in the system. 'My main contention is that the BMC is itself not equipped to deal with what it is asking of citizens,' said Debi Goenka, executive trustee of the NGO Conservation Action Trust (CAT). 'Even when citizens segregate their waste into dry and wet, the BMC is often seen mixing the two, bringing citizens' efforts to nought.' In other words, Goenka said, the BMC doesn't practice what its bye-laws preach. Goenka also wondered how the civic administration proposed to enforce a whole new set of rules when there were ample gaps in infrastructure and implementation of the BMC's policies. 'The BMC talks about prohibiting littering, but there are far too few public bins and the ones that are there are often overflowing,' he said. 'Now, all of a sudden, the civic body is expecting homes to segregate waste into four categories. Yet there is little on the BMC's responsibility for providing the proper infrastructure for storage, and timely and proper segregated collection of the waste. 'They are also making it compulsory for bulk waste generators to compost wet waste within their own premises, but most lack any space to walk in their housing societies, occupied by parked cars. Even the latest Development Control Regulations (DCR) don't mandate space for this during construction,' Goenka said. He made another powerful point. 'There is no onus on the manufacturers of waste, especially plastic. Instead, they have introduced loopholes which allow manufactures to escape the rules with regard to plastic waste, simply by saying it will apply to those with the 'main component' of plastic. This is an easy way out for manufacturers producing tetrapacks,' he said. Kedar Sohoni, founder of the NGO Green Communities Foundation, highlighted the glaring lack of attention to waste in slums and the role of informal waste pickers in the system. 'In the slums, even simple door-to-door waste collection is broken. Most dump their garbage in community bins, which means no segregation,' he said, at a townhall on solid waste management, organised by Mumbai Donut CoLAB with other NGOs, on Wednesday. 'Neither have they taken steps to integrate waste pickers into the system, when ideally, they should be an integral part of the waste collection process, doing the door-to-door collection of segregated waste,' he said. Sohoni pointed out that the dry waste segregation centres, meant to sort dry waste at the ward level and dispatch it for recycling, are falling apart. 'The BMC should extend the consultative process on the bye-laws and work on improving them,' he said. Natasha D'Costa, founder of the NGO Start Upcycling Now, and who was also present at the townhall, said, 'The bye-laws make no mention of waste pickers. Rather, they state that all the waste will go to the BMC. This leaves the question of what will happen to private vendors and the unorganised sector, which forms the backbone of the unorganised waste market.' Meanwhile, Goenka, Sohini and D'Costa welcomed the BMC's decision to defer the user fee for garbage collection in Mumbai. 'The BMC has not provided a rationale for charging the fee, when we're already paying property tax, which is meant to cover these services,' said Goenka. In any case, Sohoni said, any user fee should be based on the volume of waste generated, not the area of the home. 'This gives an incentive to citizens to reduce their waste, rather than continuing to generate more waste as they're paying for it,' he said. Until now, over 2,500 responses have been submitted to the draft bye-laws, a substantial number relating to the now-deferred user fee.
IOL News
3 days ago
- Politics
- IOL News
Why Trump should be the last person SA can take advice from
That the detractors of Black majority rule in South Africa should invoke the support and authority of a politician of the likes of Trump is both revealing and outrageous, says the writer. Image: AFP Mushtak Parker FORGET about the art of diplomacy, the banalities of whether President Cyril Ramaphosa was ambushed, mugged, braaied, or whether he displayed an admirable demeanour of ubuntu-like stoicism for the greater good when he met President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on May 21. The danger is to overthink the non-meeting between the two leaders which was more like a self-entitled and delusional emperor holding court over a vassal surrounded by a cabal of sycophantic courtiers and a coterie of reluctant foreign conscientious objectors. Then there are those relics of the apartheid era who will never accept the end of white supremacist rule in South Africa whether for reasons of eugenics or even a grossly misconceived notion of divine sanction, and who hanker for its return, disguised or otherwise, in whichever 21st century 'transformation'. Here one can sense the emergence of a global alliance of supremacist forces bringing together the far right in North and South America, the European Union, Eastern Europe including Russia, and Australasia - united by a socio-cultural ideology based on skin colour and the superiority of the white race, under the banner 'White Nationalists of the World Unite and Fight'. Whereas the likes of Bolsonaro, Milei, Orban and Meloni in power are largely ineffective because of their lacklustre governance and irrelevance, and their lack of global reach and influence, and the failure of Weidel, Le Pen, Wilders, Farage and others to do so, it is the second coming of Donald Trump, erroneously but flatteringly regarded as the 'Leader of the Free World' that has emboldened this nefarious alliance seeded and nurtured in the US, seeking out and picking fights with resource rich countries elsewhere under the veil of white victimhood, as in the case of the white Afrikaners in South Africa, and the spectre of corrupt largesse as in the case of DCR and its enormous booty of critical minerals. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. 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Next Stay Close ✕ Not surprisingly, they and their ilk are the ones who are hailing Trump for calling out the appalling crime rate, the state of corruption and the entirely legitimate policy of affirmative action in South Africa, instead of castigating him for peddling a litany of fake news, misrepresentation and half-truths, courtesy of the American Alt Right, about Afrikaner 'genocide', white victimhood and marginalisation. Others in our midst albeit less extreme but still beholden to a neo-liberal dispensation for the post-apartheid South Africa, revel in the pastime of ANC-baiting, at least in the policy, delivery and outcomes failures of the Zuma and Ramaphosa administrations. Not all Afrikaners nor White South Africans, like their Black and Brown compatriots, of course are racists or bigoted. Many on all sides were eminently involved in the liberation struggle directly or indirectly, several of whom made the ultimate sacrifice in the notorious apartheid prisons. That the detractors of Black majority rule in South Africa should invoke the support and authority of a politician of the likes of Trump is both revealing and outrageous. It is either an act of desperation or a naïve attempt at whitewashing the excesses of apartheid rule or in the hope of a resurgent white nationalism led by the world's largest economy and military machine sweeping the globe that somehow could impact the fortunes of like-minded polities in Europe, the Americas and Oceana, and white minorities elsewhere. Trump is the last person South Africans of all people with their two centuries plus fight against colonialism and apartheid should heed advice from. Firstly, it's none of his business. Secondly, as the adage goes: 'Charity begins at home.' Trump is not a moral man. His moral compass has long been lost in the fog of his narcissism (his apologists call it his quirkiness, eccentricity, and unpredictability). In terms of polity, he is the anti-Christ of democracy, willing at a blink of an eye to destroy its very fabric – elections, separation of powers, rule of law, due process, independent judiciary, and the spate of associated oversights and checks and balances. Forget about his reality show antics and his dubious credentials as an exponent of the 'Art of the Deal.' Of all the fake news and half-truths he has rolled out against South Africa, the US treatment of its Black and Latino populations infinitely overshadows both in terms of victims killed at the hand of a seemingly egregious police force, and foreigners being arbitrarily kidnapped in broad daylight on the streets of the USA by ICE-clad operatives and so-called law enforcement agents without due legal process. The abolition of habeas corpus is being touted by the die-hard MAGA fringe under the guise of national interest and security. How poignant that the Oval Office soap opera came a few days shy of the 5th anniversary on May 25, of the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black American man, in Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, a 44-year-old White police officer, who knelt on Floyd's neck for over nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face-down in a street. South Africa is a nascent democracy, barely three decades the wiser. Its learning curve has been very steep and what it has achieved in terms of constitutional government, freedom of the press, truth and reconciliation and transfer of power and even now in coalition government, is remarkable. Those who are obsessed with a neo-liberal agenda for the country are weighed down by the straitjacket of their own narrow ideology bereft of any understanding of nor empathy with the ravages and brutality of centuries of colonialism and apartheid rule. The same applies to factions within the ANC coalition and other parties such as the SACP and EFF, beholden to equally foreign ideologies – Marxism, Maoism, Afro-communism – which is as anathema to the spirit of Ubuntuism as is unfettered robber baron capitalism. Just as Madiba recognised reconciliation and forgiveness as a pathway for the future of the republic, he was also aware of the enormous challenges that lay ahead in institutional and capacity building, in crime and punishment, in democratising education, job creation, youth engagement, gender balance and above all narrowing the huge inequality gaps in income, access to services et al and in opportunities. In some respect the ANC has been a victim of its own governance hubris. If Zuma presided over the wanton state capture of assets with its associated corruption and cronyism, Ramaphosa has failed to stem the slide towards gratuitous self-enrichment, mismanagement, ineffective decision-making and policy implementation, enforcement and legal consequences, albeit things are less dire as under the Zuma era. Objections to Black/Brown empowerment and affirmative action, a tried and tested precedent in other post-colonial societies, are a red herring. Such policies can have time limits, but the criteria must be unequivocal. Similarly, the conduct of democratic polity in which the ConCourt has dismissed race hate chants by the EFF seemingly as constitutional, is mind-boggling. It only gives succour to the Trumps of this world. Modern diplomacy is supposedly the art of influencing the decisions and behaviour of foreign governments and peoples through dialogue, negotiation, and other measures short of war or violence. The proof will be in the pudding. We wait with bated breath what goodies or nasties the trade negotiations between the two countries conjure up over the next few months. Parker is a writer based in London
Axios
3 days ago
- Health
- Axios
Inside "Toke & Trail," Massachusetts' medical cannabis meetups
I joined the medical cannabis patients at a "Toke & Trail" meetup recently at Halibut Point State Park in Rockport. No, I did not partake. The intrigue: Some 20 people gathered around a secluded picnic table off the main trail, eating sandwiches, swapping stories and smoking. Catch up quick: The Massachusetts Patient Advocacy Alliance started hosting Toke & Trail meetups at state parks in 2024, seeing a carveout in DCR regulations for medical cannabis. The DCR, however, says the regulations do not allow for medical cannabis consumption. How it went: I saw some new faces while I sat on the grass, doodling in my notebook. I met Gary Gill, a longtime medical cannabis patient who was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 1991. Smoking helped him maintain an appetite during the worst of his illness. The AIDS epidemic wiped out a generation of gay elders. Gill, at 65, is one of the older men who survived the virus and the cannabis crackdown prior to legalization in Massachusetts. What they're saying:"We won the war already in regards to it being legal to smoke," he says. "I think today's turnout was really nice. Nobody said anything, but we've got our documents. … I don't think anybody's going to push the issue."
Eater
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Eater
Inside Echo, Las Vegas's New Retro-Chic Listening Lounge
Natalie Young finally built the kind of space she used to daydream about: a lounge with warm light spilling over leather couches, the crackle of vinyl in the background, and and low-lit drinks designed for lingering. In March, she wrapped the 12-year run of her beloved brunch spot Eat, a cornerstone of the Fremont East dining scene, to focus fully on Echo Taste and Sound, a lounge built around a vintage analog sound system, with bites carried over from Eat, and bar talent from the storied Downtown Cocktail Room. After visiting ESP, a listening bar in Denver, Colorado, Young got the idea to open a vinyl-centric lounge of her own. 'I love music,' she says. 'I love music more than food.' But after the headache of ongoing road construction in front of Eat, which impeded foot traffic, and the increasing cost of goods, Young planned to just go out with a bang and pivot to something with a lighter lift. 'I wanted to just serve hot tea and maybe a bar and some really simple pastries and small bites — and play records,' she says. But then her business partner, Tom McAllister, shared that a space opened up in the new Colorado building on Main Street — and it had a full kitchen. The result is Echo, a retro-cool space framed by warm wood slats and acoustic paneling. Tactile pieces by local artists add texture to the walls, houseplants catch the afternoon sun that peeks between burnt orange curtains. A cozy, living room-style seating area with chairs salvaged from Downtown Cocktail Room, which is often referred to as DCR, faces Young's personal turntable setup. Also carried over from DCR is the talent. Before closing the downtown bar last year, owner Michael Cornthwaite introduced Young to his longtime general manager, Jackie Loran. 'She's now my general manager and running the bar program at Echo,' Young says. As a sober owner, Young made it a priority to develop an inclusive beverage menu from the start. Echo's menu features zero-proof takes on classic cocktails like an espresso martini and more experimental mocktails like one with sparkling citrus and ube. The team of DCR bartenders at Echo also whip up signature drinks like the Glory Days with popcorn-washed bourbon, sherry, and chocolate bitters and the Little Red Rooster with tequila, vanilla sandalwood syrup, and grapefruit soda. The menu at Echo is tight, with light bites meant for sharing. Visitors can expect crisp chips with a trio of dips, marinated chicken skewers, a mix of delicately fried tempura mushrooms, and toasted focaccia topped with garlicky roasted tomato spread. The beloved shrimp and grits from Eat have found a new home at Echo. As for fan favorites like the thick-cut grilled cheese and deep-fried deviled eggs, Young says they might return when the weather cools. For Young, vinyl isn't just about sound — it demands attention and commitment, like smoking a cigar, she says. It's a love that began in her childhood, sprawled on the shag carpet, playing Elton John's Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy over and over and over. Now she fills Echo with jazz, funk, and world music, deftly flipping from Nina Simone to Casey Chapman to Miles Davis and John Coltrane. The main room at Echo features high-fidelity McIntosh gear chosen specifically for full-album playback. Young imported her vintage analog speaker system from home, and a DJ booth glows with the neon green lights of a state-of-the-art suite of McIntosh turntables and amplifiers. In the back, a 12-seat VIP listening room is being acoustically treated and outfitted with a rotating lineup of elite equipment — including vintage McIntosh 75 tube amps and La Scala speakers — for those who want a more intimate, audiophile-caliber experience. In the future, the space will host multi-course dinners paired with guided listening sessions that highlight the character of each setup. Young says fellow vinyl heads often peruse the Moondog Records display, thumbing through the collection of records for sale before walking out with four or five new finds. While Main Street tends to skew younger, especially with the adjacent Swan Dive drawing a late-night crowd, she appreciates that Echo attracts an older audience. 'I kind of built something for high-age people, you know, like 40-plus,' she says. Whether seated at the bar beneath artwork that used to adorn the walls at DCR, cozied up into a booth to nosh on Mexican shrimp cocktail, or lazing in the living room setup to watch a DJ — or sometimes Young, herself — man the turntables, Young says that Echo is the place to begin or end the night, to have a conversation, and to listen to the music. Sign up for our newsletter.
