Austin, TX
Federal railroad grant denied for passenger rail in central Texas
![Federal railroad grant denied for passenger rail in central Texas](https://images.foxtv.com/static.fox7austin.com/www.fox7austin.com/content/uploads/2023/12/1280/720/23F9E2E0501419A99899E1470E2EDD14.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
Federal grant denied for Texas passenger rail
The Federal Railroad Administration has denied grant money for the fastest-growing metro areas in Texas when it comes to passenger rail expansion.
AUSTIN, Texas – On Friday, the Federal Railroad Administration approved five corridors for passenger rail expansion in Texas and excluded the corridor connecting Austin, San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth.
“So that is disappointing news, but it’s not the end of the track,” said Travis County Judge Andy Brown. “We still have work to do, obviously, to get CAMPO and the MPO’s for San Antonio and Dallas on board with putting rail in their priorities for their plans.”
The Federal Railroad Administration’s corridor identification and development program would provide $500,000 to study a proposed rail corridor. The grant award would make the Texas Department of Transportation’s proposed project eligible for additional federal funding at an 80 percent to 20 percent federal-state match.
“What I’m planning on doing is meeting with representatives of the Federal Railroad Administration. I think I may have a meeting set on Monday,” Judge Brown said. “I’m trying at least to ask them, A, could they just reconsider, and is there something we could do to get this in that plan for now? And if not, what is the path forward? How do we get into that?”
Rail connecting central Texas cities proposed
As the state’s population grows, so does traffic on heavily travelled roadways. But some say there may be another option; FOX 7’s Mike Warren speaks with Travis County Commissioner’s Court Judge Andy Brown for more.
Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai in a statement said, in part, “We must do more to meet the demands of our time and address the key challenges we face as one of the fastest growing communities in the nation and improve transit with passenger rail in central Texas.”
Austin Mayor Kirk Watson previously spoke at the nation’s capital looking to expand interstate transportation options.
“You have communities that would then allow them to maybe not live in the major metropolitan areas because of cost or otherwise. But still be able to participate in those economies,” Mayor Watson said.
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Judge Brown says they look forward to working with our state and federal partners on future rail projects.
“Just think of this: Next time you’re stuck in traffic on I-35 between Austin and San Antonio, look off, you know, to the left of there, to the right, and think how nice it would be to be riding on a comfortable train with maybe a café car, having a cup of coffee, reading your phone or whatever, talking to people on the way instead of being stuck in traffic,” Judge Brown said. “That’s really what we’re trying to solve for here.”
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Austin, TX
Cody Jinks to play in tornado relief benefit concert
![Cody Jinks to play in tornado relief benefit concert](https://gray-kxii-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/2GW3645FSBDBJCU7PWHAR7RRJM.jpg?auth=f48077828acadc7020d0af0773821e2f2b539c331f506abbbfbd7ac369c75fc0&width=1200&height=600&smart=true)
SAINT JO, Texas (KXII) – Red River Station is hosting a Texas tornado relief benefit concert in July.
Cody Jinks is playing at the Red River Station on July 14 and 100% of the proceeds will go to Cooke County Volunteer Organization Active in Disaster (VOAD) to help those affected by the 2024 tornadoes.
Click here for concert tickets. Click here to donate.
Copyright 2024 KXII. All rights reserved.
Austin, TX
AI could strain Texas power grid this summer
![AI could strain Texas power grid this summer](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/21b76de/2147483647/strip/true/crop/5239x2750+0+371/resize/1200x630!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fa4%2F04%2F98612dc841238f4461df3d098665%2Fercot-media-tour-42136116831-o.jpg)
Texas is no stranger to power-grid anxiety. Between the heat that’s only getting hotter, an aging fleet of power plants, and the challenges of integrating renewable energy, the system is fragile.
Now, a boom in energy-hungry computer data centers is adding a new element of risk this summer.
“How many are coming? That’s still TBD, but we know that they are explosively growing,” ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas, told lawmakers in one of two hearings this month at the state capitol.
Vegas said many of those centers mine crypto currency. But more and more of them are being built to support artificial intelligence systems. They are drawn to the state thanks to low energy costs, minimal regulation and a booming economy. But they use a lot of energy.
“If you do a google search and just look up ‘What is ERCOT?’ If you did that with a regular google system versus an AI google search, the amount of energy that it takes to run the AI search, is between 10 and 30 times the power requirement than to do a traditional google search,” Vegas said.
Many estimates you find online appear to be on the lower end of that spectrum. But it’s clear that Texas, in particular, could find that growing energy demand challenging.
Ever since a deadly blackout in 2021, state officials have worked to strengthen the power grid. They’ve started programs to subsidize new power plants and improve transmission lines.
But, those things take years to build. Data centers — some that use as much energy as small cities — can be built in just a matter of months. That is a serious challenge for grid operators, says Doug Lewin, who publishes the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter.
“How do we build enough infrastructure to accommodate a new city popping up in six months, with effectively no notice?” he asks.
The answer: maybe you don’t.
Renee Dominguez
/
KUT News
‘The most worrisome thing’
State officials have long declared Texas “open for business.” Reveling in each victory as they lured things like Tesla’s new gigafactory and Samsung’s new microchip plant to the state.
But now, some wonder whether data centers are worth it.
Cryptomines and data centers “produce very few jobs compared to the incredible demands they place on our grid,” Lt. Governor Dan Patrick posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, after the hearings. “Texans will ultimately pay the price.”
State lawmakers, likewise, peppered this month’s hearings with questions about whether the state could put the brakes on data center growth, or compel the companies to pay for their increased energy transmission needs.
“That’s sort of wild to think about,” Lewin said. “That’s a huge, huge break from the way things have been done.”
Assuming that cryptomines and data centers are here to stay, grid operators say they would like new rules to allow them to better monitor the facilities’ energy use and potentially control it.
Despite recent legislation compelling cryptomines to register with ERCOT, Vegas told members of the House State Affairs Committee that about half of companies still have not.
“On legislation […] what would be more helpful for ERCOT is to have more visibility to what these large loads are doing,” he said. “And so a good place to start could be making sure we can track and even potentially control the [energy] loads of cryptos.”
At a recent ERCOT board of directors meeting, Dan Woodfin, the group’s vice president of system operations, said the inability to forecast energy use by crypto mines and similar big power consumers was “the most worrisome thing” going into this summer.
ERCOT puts the chance of rolling blackouts at around 12% in August.
Demand is outpacing supply
In the electricity business, what Vegas proposes — reducing energy use by certain users at certain times — is often called a “demand side” solution to grid challenges.
The idea is that you can strengthen the grid more cheaply and quickly by lowering energy consumption rather than increasing supply.
“We cannot build the grid fast enough to keep up with demand… Even before we had every damned crypto and data center … move to Texas,” Alison Silverstein, a consultant and former state and federal energy official, told KUT.
Texas currently consumes more energy than any other state. Silverstein has long advocated for increasing energy efficiency standards in the state to help bolster the energy system.
A recent study from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy says improving efficiency standards in Texas would be a more economical way of reducing high energy demand in the summer and winter to strengthen the grid.
Silverstein says it would not only mean people need less power to cool their homes, run their appliances and do business, it would also go a long way toward keeping the lights on.
But lawmakers and regulators have traditionally balked at improving efficiency in Texas, a state known for producing energy not conserving it.
Silverstein says that may be changing, as the challenges of rapidly increasing energy demand become clearer to those in charge of the Texas power system.
At one recent hearing ERCOT’s Vegas referred to efficiency and demand response as an essential tool in keeping the Texas grid stable.
Silverstein says the question is whether that rhetoric will turn into state policy.
“That’s when we’ll know that they really mean it in terms of demand-side solutions, and it’s not just hand waving,” she says.
Austin, TX
Austin woman missing for 40 years, one of many on site dedicated to solving cases
![Austin woman missing for 40 years, one of many on site dedicated to solving cases](https://images.foxtv.com/static.fox7austin.com/www.fox7austin.com/content/uploads/2024/06/1280/720/sharon-mccully.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
Missing in Texas: Sharon McCully
In this edition of Missing in Texas, we take a look at a case of an Austin woman who disappeared after going Christmas shopping nearly 40 years ago.
AUSTIN, Texas – The case of an Austin woman who went missing 40 years ago is still a mystery. She’s one of many on a site designed to collect information about unsolved cases called “Solve the Case.”
Sharon McCully disappeared on December 11, 1984.
She was doing Christmas shopping that day and had left lunch with her husband. She dropped him off at his job and drove away, last seen going east on Howard Lane towards I-35.
Her car, an off-white 1965 Volkswagen Beetle, was found two days later, unlocked and abandoned at an apartment complex on the 8600 block of Research Boulevard, about five-and-a-half miles from her last known location. Her keys and purse were gone.
“Sharon was not believed to have had any connection with that apartment complex,” “Solve the Case” founder Aaron Benzick said. “There’s just no information to be concerned about the husband or anyone close to her at that point.”
MISSING IN TEXAS
When her husband got home from work, she wasn’t there. After waiting and calling her friends, he reported her missing the next day.
“Really speaks to there being an unknown factor that gets involved in this,” Benzick said.
McCully’s story is one of many on “Solve the Case,” a place where all the facts of a case can be aggregated.
“With the Solve the Case platform, we’re opening up for missing persons, unsolved homicides, unidentified persons, even fugitives that are on the run, have warrants out for their arrest and haven’t been found for many years,” Benzick said.
Benzick’s day job is a homicide detective in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He got the idea to create the website after he got a bulletin about a decades-old case of someone who went to the same high school as him.
“Family had expressed some frustration, ‘we’ve been trying to promote our son’s missing person case, bring awareness of the case, and some of the things we’ve shared haven’t been updated, and we don’t really know what to do with that.’ That kind of inspired me to create this home page for victims,” he said.
MORE STORIES
Cases on the site can come from law enforcement or families.
“When you create the case page on Solve the Case, we’re going to walk you through. Here are the things that should be happening in your case, during a missing person investigation,” Benzick said.
For McCully’s case and so many others across the nation, “We want to build out a database of where known offenders were operating at that time,” Benzick said. “At minimum, we want to tell Sharon’s story.”
The hope is that the community can work together to solve mysteries.
“Through creating this platform, we’re hoping to open up this information nationwide, get families, victims, law enforcement all on the same page in a consistent way so that we can do the most good on these missing person cases,” Benzick said.
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