After repeatedly being a victim of copper theft, a Florida electric cooperative successfully fought for tough new ordinances in two counties it serves, and is now taking the battle to a third.

The arrow points to the missing 4/0 ground wires that copper thieves stole from this Georgia Transmission substation. (Photo By: Georgia Transmission)

“We contacted the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office and worked with them in conjunction with the county commission and got the law passed,” said David Lambert, manager, member relations, at Withlacoochee River Electric Cooperative.

The Dade City-based co-op has seen the number of copper theft cases—and the resulting bills—pile up. In 2007, Withlacoochee suffered $6,861 in theft and vandalism. Two years later the total reached $108,809. By last year the figure jumped to $266,780.

Florida is just one front in the copper theft war, where battles are also being fought in Georgia and Illinois. But in the Sunshine State, time is of the essence in getting county bills approved.

“There is a bill moving through the state legislature. But if the local bill gets in first, and it’s tougher, the local provision stays in,” Lambert explained.

The Pasco County measure was passed Feb. 7, with Hernando County following a week later. Both require scrap dealers to use the same software program as pawn brokers. The recyclers will have to record all metal purchases and email the list to the sheriff’s office by 10 a.m. the following day.

Lambert said “good, legal recyclers don’t have a problem with” the new law.

Withlacoochee supports similar legislation in Citrus County. “We’re going to hit every county that we can,” Lambert told ECT.coop.

In neighboring Georgia, a handful of copper theft bills are pending in the state legislature.

“We support the legislation,” said Tom Parker, vice president, external affairs and member relations, at Georgia Transmission Corp., which serves 39 distribution co-ops.

“We continue to have a problem with metal theft here. We’re terribly concerned about the safety implications for our employees and our contractors when they go into a substation. It’s the same with the EMC employees and contractors.”

Georgia co-ops have long been at the forefront of the state’s fight against copper theft, helping to get a law passed in 2009. But Parker said thieves are branching out—hitting cemeteries and churches, among other places, and attracting media attention.

“It’s got a lot of legislators energized,” Parker said.

The primary bill, which has already passed a state Senate committee, would create an electronic database of metal sellers and purchasers, and require payments be made by check or electronic transfer, not cash.

Parker called 2011 the “roughest year” Tucker-based Georgia Transmission has had with metal theft, recording 143 incidents, with each incident costing between $3,000 and $5,000.

Illinois is also moving closer to getting a new copper theft law. The House Judiciary Committee approved a bill which, among other things, would require recyclers to keep records of all metal purchases, not just those greater than $100. It would also include property damage amounts when tallying the value of the theft for the purpose of determining penalties.

Larry Downing | ReutersCopies of President Barack Obama’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget are seen stacked inside the House Budget Committee room on Capitol Hill in Washington.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama included $150 million for research and development at a proposed uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio in his fiscal year 2013 budget today.

The move would keep the increasingly controversial project alive and, presumably, a political football heading into the 2012 elections.

Overall, the president’s budget, considered a blueprint of administration priorities, included congressionally mandated cuts of $1 trillion in federal dollars over the next decade. But Obama also injected more than $350 billion in measures aimed at jump-starting the economy, including extending the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance benefits for the rest of 2012; spending $50 billion on highways, rails and runways; and $30 billion to help local communities keep and hire teachers and first responders.

Ohio lawmakers praised the inclusion of money for the long-struggling and controversial American Centrifuge Project. USEC, the Maryland-based company that wants to launch the project in Ohio, has tried for more than three years to get a $2 billion federal loan guarantee to commercialize the project to no avail. Supporters hope the $150 million will kick-start technological developments at the plant.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, applauded the inclusion of the money, saying it “takes us one step closer” to the plant becoming a reality.

News wasn’t all great for the Portsmouth region, however: The budget also included a 25 percent reduction in federal funds for cleanup to the adjacent Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The cleanup is being handled by two companies – Babcock & Wilcox and Fluor Corp. – and is not directly affiliated with the uranium enrichment project’s fate.

Part of the cutbacks required in a spending deal with Congress include $487 billion chopped from the defense budget over the next decade. Under Obama’s plan, the federal government would spend $613.9 billion on defense programs in fiscal 2013. Of that, $88.5 billion was in support of overseas operations, primarily in Afghanistan. The rest – $525.4 billion – would be cut by $5.2 billion from this year.

Defense decisions in particular would have an acute impact on Ohio. Obama’s plan would eliminate funding for the C-27J aircraft, the twin-engine aircraft flown at the Air National Guard Base in Mansfieldo. The move would essentially remove the flying mission from that base. It would also reduce the fleet of KC-135s at Rickenbacker Air National Guard Base from 18 to 12.

The budget would cancel the Global Hawk’s Block 30, the most common version of the unmanned surveillance plane, and replace it with the U-2, a spy plane that dates to the 1950s that has been upgraded.

The Global Hawk is among many aircraft and weapons programs managed by the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton. Personnel assigned to that program could be transferred to other management teams, base officials have said.

Even research, development, testing and evaluation – all programs that benefit Wright-Patterson – saw cuts. In fiscal 2011, those programs received $27.4 billion. Under Obama’s budget, they would decrease to $25.4 billion. However, Wright-Patterson saw fewer cuts than many defense installations nationwide.

The planned reductions may only be the beginning of impending cuts to defense spending. The Budget Control Act passed by Congress last year required a specially appointed congressional committee to cut $1.2 trillion from the budget or face massive mandatory cuts, including an additional $500 billion from the defense budget.

It’s unclear if Congress will reverse those mandatory cuts. Some, including Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, have indicated a willingness to stop those cuts before they go into effect.

Obama’s plan is only a plan, and must be passed by Congress before becoming a reality. While the House passed a budget last year, the Senate did not.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-West Chester, called Obama’s budget “a gloomy reflection of his failed policies of the past, not a bold plan for America’s future.”

“Our nation needs Washington to demonstrate some courage with a budget that honestly addresses the near- and long-term challenges we face,” he said. “Instead, the president offered a collection of rehashes, gimmicks, and tax increases that will make our economy worse.”

John Nolan of the Dayton Daily News contributed to this story.

jwehrman@dispatch.com

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Marvell Semiconductor is trying to get in on the ground floor of the smart home.

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show, the company announced a chipset that can add wireless networking to home appliances and LED light fixtures. The gear is designed to make it relatively cheap for manufacturers to make connected versions of common goods, such as thermostats and dishwashers.

A smart home that lets people remotely monitor and control appliances and electronics is likely to be a theme at CES this year as it was last year.

(Credit: Marvell)

One of the technical challenges with making household items network-aware is that they typically don’t have very much computing power. Marvell’s Smart Appliances Platform includes a Wi-Fi wireless networking chip as well as a microcontroller to handle the processing involved in communicating with other devices, such as a smart meter or home control application.

The package also includes software that makes it relatively straightforward to write connected-appliance applications that can run on iOS or Android, said Kishore Manghnani, vice president of the green technology products group at Marvell. A dishwasher manufacturer, for example, could write an application so that a technician could remotely diagnose problems, or to allow a consumer to remotely control it.

Marvell has one appliance manufacturer that is planning on releasing a smart appliance based on the system in the second half of this year. With an added cost of $5, the net increase cost of a connected appliance to consumers is about $10, according to the company.

Marvell has created a similar platform aimed at lighting fixture and controller manufacturers. It’s first targeting commercial lighting and then hopes to address the consumer market.

The system uses Zigbee wireless chips, which would be embedded into a light fixture’s controller, and a small gateway device, which can communicate with 200 individual fixtures or bulbs.

At CES, Marvell plans to demonstrate how the wireless networking can allow a person to manage and schedule lighting from a central point to improve efficiency.

A number of companies, including Daintree Networks and Enlighted, are making wireless lighting systems intended to lower energy consumption. Marvell’s system will add a few dollars of cost to lighting fixtures, which will help drive smart lighting adoption, Manghnani said.

Natural gas is the cheapest it’s been in a decade.

Prices have dropped by more than 10 percent in the past week, including a plunge of almost 6 percent on Wednesday, as a mild winter cuts into heating demand and a production boom pumps up supplies.

Homeowners should eventually benefit from lower heating and electric bills. “There’s just too much gas out there, and there’s no evidence that people are shutting in gas production yet to compensate,” said Ron Denhardt, an analyst with Strategic Energy & Economic Research.

Natural gas demand usually soars in the winter as homeowners and businesses crank up the heat. But in many parts of the U.S., thermostats haven’t been turned up as much this year.

The winter of 2012 has yet to pack much punch, with average temperatures well above normal. December was particularly warm in the Northeast and upper Midwest, where homeowners typically face frigid weather and high winter heating bills. In the Northeast, there have been only four warmer Decembers in the last 117 years, according to the National Weather Service. Long-range forecasts show above-average temperatures continuing over the next few weeks.

Natural gas supplies were already above the five-year average at the start of the year, and that’s expected to continue. Analysts expect the Energy Department to report on Thursday that supplies dropped only slightly last week, according to Platts, the energy-information arm of McGraw-Hill Cos.

The natural gas futures contract fell 17 cents to end at $2.77 per 1,000 cubic feet. Natural gas hasn’t been this cheap at this time of year since 2002.

Shares of natural gas producers fell as well on Wednesday. Range Resources Corp. stock dropped by 6.1 percent, while EQT Corp. shares fell by 5.4 percent and Chesapeake Energy Corp. shares were down 3.4 percent.

Cheaper gas prices should lower average heating bills this winter to about $700 per household, according to Mark Wolfe, Executive Director of the National Energy Assistance Director’s Association. That’s a 3 percent decline from last year and the fourth consecutive year of declines. By comparison, heating oil bills have risen 8 percent this year.

“If you are using natural gas your situation is getting steadily better,” Wolfe said. “If you are using heating oil, your situation is getting steadily worse.”

Just over half of U.S. households heat with natural gas. Their bills will likely shrink further in the coming months. Because of the way utilities are regulated and buy natural gas, it can take a year before the full effect of a change in natural gas prices can reach a customer’s bill.

Some utilities use natural gas to run generators that produce electricity, so electric bills could also come down for some consumers.

In other energy trading, oil prices dropped Wednesday, as weak U.S. energy demand pushed petroleum supplies sharply higher.

Benchmark crude fell by 1.37 to finish at $100.87 per barrel in New York. Brent crude, which is used to price foreign oil varieties that are imported by U.S. refineries, fell by 88 cents to $112.40 per barrel in London.

The Energy Information Administration’s weekly report on petroleum supplies showed gasoline demand fell by 4.8 percent last week from a year ago, while demand for all petroleum products dropped by 6.5 percent.

As consumers and businesses cut back, producers put more into storage than analysts expected. Oil supplies rose by 5 million barrels last week while gasoline supplies grew by 3.6 million barrels. Distillate supplies — including diesel and heating oil — increased by 4 million barrels. Analysts had expected oil supplies to shrink by a million barrels last week, with gasoline and distillate supplies rising by 1.75 million and 1.35 million barrels, respectively.

Oil prices began falling after Germany said its economy contracted in the final three months of 2011.That raised concerns about the rest of Europe’s economy. Germany, the eurozone’s strongest member, is expected to prop up its neighbors as they work to overcome massive government debts. If the region slides into recession, oil demand will likely decline.

At the pump, U.S. gasoline prices were unchanged at a national average of $3.37 per gallon, according to AAA, Wright Express and Oil Price Information Service. A gallon of regular is about 10 cents higher than a month ago and 28 cents more than a year ago.

Heating oil lost 4 cents to finish at $3.06 per gallon and gasoline futures fell 1 cent to end at $2.76 per gallon.

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