A solar array at Nellis Air Force Base. Wikicommons
When Stephanie Garcia Richard took the office of State Land Commissioner following the 2018 elections, she had the goal of tripling renewable energy development on state lands.
“We are very rapidly closing in on that goal two years later,” Garcia Richard told
NM Political Report.
There were 453 megawatts of renewable energy when she took office. That has more than doubled in the past couple of years and the State Land Office has inked deals for even more future projects.
Angie Poss, a spokesperson for the State Land Office, said 466 megawatts have been added since Garcia Richard took office and, with the upcoming projects, the office will definitely get to the goal of tripling renewable energy on state trust land.
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Timber, Condos, Glamping? States Debate Land Use to Fund Schools
This stand of state trust land forest near Washington’s Merrill Lake is logged to provide revenue for schools.
The Pew Charitable Trusts
SEATTLE Checkerboarded across the landscape of the American West are thousands of parcels of state-owned land that collectively cover an area larger than North Dakota. They include vast swaths of forest and prairie, fracking wells, coal mines, luxury housing developments, parking lots, cell towers and solar panels.
Known as state trust lands, these parcels were given to Western states as they were admitted to the Union, setting them up with a long-term revenue stream to fund public services, primarily schools. Although the rules can vary by state, government officials generally have broad leeway to manage the lands to provide that education funding. Historically, that’s often come from timber harvesting, agriculture and grazing lea
The natural gas storage report from the EIA for the week ending April 2nd indicated that the amount of natural gas held in underground storage in the US rose by 20 billion cubic feet to 1,784 billion cubic feet by the end of the week, which left our gas supplies 235 billion cubic feet, or 11.6% below the 2,019 billion cubic feet that were in storage on April 2nd of last year, and 36 billion cubic feet, or 1.3% below the five-year average of 1,808 billion cubic feet of natural gas that have been in storage as of the 2nd of April in recent years..the 20 billion cubic feet that were added to US natural gas storage this week was less than the average forecast of a 27 billion cubic foot addition from an S&P Global Platts survey of analysts, and was also less than the 30 billion cubic feet added to natural gas storage during the corresponding week of a year earlier, but was well more than the average addition of 8 billion cubic feet of natural gas that have typically been injected into nat
. Support comes from the Pulitzer Center.
The fracking boom in the Permian Basin which straddles West Texas and southeastern New Mexico largely coincided with Republican control of much of New Mexico’s state government. Many of those elected to office in the early years of the shale rush promptly began dismantling barriers to extracting the most oil and gas at the cheapest price: Soon after winning the governorship in 2010, Republican Susana Martinez shuffled key employees in the environment department into positions where they had little expertise. During her eight-year tenure, the state legislature slashed the budget for the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division (OCD), which oversees the oil and gas industry, by 25 percent. By 2018, half of all inspection and compliance positions were vacant.
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