Princeton, Massachusetts, continues to move steadily forward with its municipal broadband initiative. We first reported on the community’s plans in the Spring of 2012. The community approved funding for design services in May and recently hired G4S Technology to design the FTTH network for municipal government, schools and residents. The Digital Journal reports: The design will … Read More
It has been about a year since we checked in on FiberNet Monticello, a city-owned FTTH network about 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis. At that time, the network was generating insufficient revenue to meet debt payments, the private company operating the network (HBC) was stepping down, and Gigabit Squared was kicking the tires. Since then, Gigabit … Read More
GreentechSolar, May 29, 2013 In 2012, Germany’s big four utilities — EnBW, E.ON, RWE, and Vattenfall — produced 75 percent of the country’s power, but were responsible for only 5 percent of renewables investments, as depicted by a graph from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). Regional and municipal utilities owned another 7 percent of German … Read More
Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU) just announced that it is ready to serve customers with 1 gig service. Earlier this year, CFU increased speeds for existing customers at no expense and we watched their expansion and upgrade from cable to FTTH. Jon Ericson reported in the Courier that the city hopes to boost economic development in Cedar … Read More
On May 14th, Susan Crawford will speak at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in San Francisco. The event will be hosted by the Division of Ratepayer Advocates (DRA) of the CPUC, and the theme of the discussion will be “Digital Communications in the United States: Should Broadband Communications be a Public Utility Service?” The event … Read More
In a recent New York Daily New article, Scott Stringer wrote about the Big Apple’s tech employment trends. He noted that more tech related positions now come to the city but those jobs still tend to elude women and people of color. He suggests looking at New York’s own workforce and offering better science and technology … Read More
Some Minnesota legislators are getting a little weak-kneed listening to utility lobbyists make hugely ironic claims about the cost of the proposed solar standard and thinking about how much solar this is. Time for some context. The originally proposed 10% solar energy standard might have been ambitious by national standards, but the current 4% by 2025 … Read More
If you’re a state legislator in Minnesota, here are a few grains of salt to season the message you’ve been getting from electric utilities about the proposed solar energy standard. The bill (HF956/SF901) requires most utilities to get 4% of their energy from solar by 2025 and offers a standard, fixed-price contract to distributed solar energy producers … Read More
“My answer has been, as it is tonight, to point out these plain principles,” Roosevelt told the crowd. “That where a community — a city or county or a district — is not satisfied with the service rendered or the rates charged by the private utility, it has the undeniable basic right, as one of its … Read More
