#cuyama

[highvoltageindustries]

Some distro storm damage with the Kerntucky Highliners⚡️ #ibew1245 #ibew #12kv #cuyama Posted by @jskittles https://www.instagram.com/p/CpijSJ_uwxB/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[unteriors]

Morales Street, New Cuyama, California.

[roses-n-rads]

S? 💙

I have a lot of ocs with an S name lmao

Segovia Arias - was going to college for library science before going into the vault at 19, came out of the vault and almost immediately joined the brotherhood as a scribe, handles a gun better than most scribes because she grew up on a cattle ranch in NC

Sidra Ray - an spn oc that I haven't fleshed out much aside from being a hunter that is the go to for a variety of hunters when they need something researched

Sarah Page - another peggie except she's a true believer, gets paired with Wren as a babysitter by Joseph himself and she absolutely will snitch if given the chance

Scottford Ryder - Jaliyah's twin who is an absolute disaster bisexual and menace to society like definitely go through his character tag bc it is so on point lmao

Sienna Cuyama - courier who tears through the wasteland looking for that coward Benny and also dismantling the hold mr house has on vegas and kicks the NCR and caesar out entirely

Shah - a settler/sheppard who lives on Spectacle island with her cousin and aunt taking care of sheep, yes they survived 200 years, she doesn't leave the island often but when she does it's usually with Riah and Alawa and they always get into trouble lmao

Shoshone - works in the minutemen under Breemer as kinda a lieutenant but mostly as just his right hand man, what's so funny about breemer and shoshone is that when one is serious the other is a literal goofball and they take turns on who has rights to the braincell

[thoughtportal]

It sounds weird to say that carrots are having a moment, but social media has catapulted the humble root to a status resembling stardom. Anecdotal evidence suggests online carrot recipes trail in popularity only those for potatoes and brussels sprouts among vegetables, and Pinterest numbers support that: recipe searches for honey balsamic carrots on the platform are up 75% this year, while queries for roasted parmesan carrots skyrocketed 700%. Fresh carrots are an expanding $1.4 billion U.S. market, andAmericans are expected to consume 100 million pounds this Thanksgiving — roughly five ounces for every human being in the country.

At least 60% of those carrots are produced by just two companies, Bolthouse and Grimmway, both of which were acquired by buyout firms, in 2019 and 2020 respectively.

“There’s only two sources,” Adam Waglay, cofounder and co-CEO of Bolthouse owner Butterfly Equity, told Forbes. “We joke around — it’s kind of like the OPEC of carrots.”

Cartels are less funny for neighbors of the two producers in Southern California’s Cuyama Valley, who are calling for a boycott of Big Carrot over the amount of water their farms are sucking out of the ground. In 2022, Bolthouse and Grimmway together were responsible for 67%, or 9.6 billion gallons, of the area’s total water use. Local residents said they expect their wells to dry up if the carrot farms continue to use as much water as they do — Grimmway CEO Jeff Huckaby told Forbes his company has already reduced the amount of acreage it farms — and the two carrot producers have joined forces to defend their thirst in court. That worries local residents, who say they lack the deep pockets needed to wage a prolonged legal battle.

Cattle rancher Jake Furstenfeld places a boycott sign in New Cuyama, California in September.Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo

Water fights like this can take years to resolve, and often become a way to delay cutbacks, Karrigan Bork, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, told Forbes. “You see these rights again and again get trimmed back by the state or by courts,” Bork said. “In some cases, your savvy water users recognize that, and for them, just delaying that trimming back is a success, and the longer they can do that, the happier they will be.”

Price Concerns

Waglay uses the word “duopoly” to describe the two companies. Such market consolidationoften leads to higher prices, and the government has for years used increased consumer prices as an indicator of possible unfair competition. The U.S. Department of Agriculture declined to comment on any antitrust issues.

Since 2019, carrot producer prices have increased more than 40%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, outpacing the 22% inflation in the U.S. economy.

Carrot Top

Prices are near their highest since 2019, when Bolthouse was acquired by a private equity firm. Grimmway changed hands a year later.

Huckaby, the Grimmway CEO, told Forbes that the costs of a number of inputs have gone up, too. Packaging, fertilizer and fuel prices have all risen at a higher rate than inflation, he said, and California’s minimum wage has increased 27% since 2018. At $15 an hour, it’s the second-highest in the country.

Still, the carrot business has been a lucrative play. Total U.S. production value has increased 34% since 2019.

Duopoly Origins

Bolthouse, founded in 1915 in Grant, Michigan, started selling carrots packed in cellophane bags in 1959. In the 1970s and 1980s, production was centered around Bakersfield, California. After Bakersfield farmer Mike Yurosek invented “baby carrots” in 1986, consumption soared.

In the 1990s, Bolthouse ballooned into the largest carrot operator, reportedly shipping some 80% of California’s carrots. It amounted to half the U.S. carrot market in 1992, followed by Grimmway, founded by brothers Bob and Rod Grimm in 1969, and Yurosek’s family-owned outfit. Grimmway eventually bought out Mike Yurosek & Son. The carrot crop is now the tenth-biggest commodity in California, where one-third of America’s vegetables are grown.

Today, the industry’s growth could be limited by dwindling water supplies in the drought-prone Cuyama Valley, 150 miles northwest of Los Angeles and 90 miles west of Bakersfield. But the companies behind the duopoly aren’t giving up without a fight.

Both businesses, which own their own manufacturing, are hitting a similar point in their ownership lifecycles. Private equity-backed businesses typically change hands every three to five years. In 2019, Butterfly Equity acquired Bolthouse from publicly traded Campbell Soup for $510 million in cash. A year later, Grimmway was acquired by Teays River Investments, a Zionsville, Indiana-based investment firm, for an undisclosed amount. That means both businesses are in the sweet spot of what most investors consider the hot time to unload an investment or take it public.

Los Angeles, California-based Butterfly has sold only one of its investments, an organic protein company called Orgain, acquired by Nestle Health Science in February 2022 after two years of Butterfly ownership. Grimmway is Teays River’s only current investment after exiting two others in 2019 and 2013. Teays River held those investments for eight years and one year, respectively.

Grimmway’s owner, which according to Pitchbook has $1.38 billion in assets under management, is backed by pension funds including the public employees of the states of Maine and Oregon, Texas teachers, the New York state Teamsters union and the Producer-Writers Guild of America.

Butterfly Equity, by comparison, has $4 billion in assets under management and is backed byexecutives of private equity giant KKR, where Waglay worked for eight years. The firm has done eight deals in the eight years since it launched. Butterfly also owns America’s largest striped bass farm, the largest free-range egg company, an avocado oil maker that controls 60% of the market, and a large whey protein manufacturer.

Water Rights

Bolthouse and Grimmway started working with each other in a way that competitors rarely do. They filed a lawsuit together in 2021 in Kern County, California to ask a court to decide how to split up the water of New Cuyama, where they farm.

What’s happening in Cuyama Valley is an example of the kinds of water fights that are surfacing across California. Farmers of a variety of crops there have depended on irrigation for decades. Those years of pumping water and spraying it over crops through sprinklers or complex drip irrigation systems have had drastic implications, including threats of land sinking, a receding water table that makes it tougher to dig wells and the threat of some of them drying out.

That’s why water use around New Cuyama could get reduced by two-thirds over the next two decades. To bring the region back to a sustainable level by 2040, water cuts of 5% started this year and will continue each year going forward. The Cuyama basin currently has an annual water deficit of more than 8 billion gallons, and much of the area’s carrot farmland may have to be taken out of production. Some experts say Bolthouse and Grimmway would have to reduce their water consumption by about double what the city of Santa Barbara, California uses annually.

But water-efficient sprinklers can only save so much. The carrot companies’ lawsuit has forced area farmers, ranchers, residents and even the area’s public school to rack up legal bills. In response, a coalition of locals launched a boycott of carrots in July. The boycott’s goals: for the companies to drop the lawsuit, pay all legal fees and to reduce the amount of water they pump. One flyer the boycotters distributed suggests a Thanksgiving recipe for brussels sprouts instead.

Both Bolthouse and Grimmway lease farmland rather than own it. They recently withdrew from the lawsuit, though the companies that own the farmland are still in it, and what the judge decides will dictate how much the companies are able to farm there in the future.

Expanding Elsewhere

Huckaby said the carrot boycott has taken aim at Grimmway and Bolthouse because they’re easy targets. Only 3,700 of the 13,000 acres that Grimmway leases in the Cuyama Valley are being farmed, according to Huckaby. “We cut way back and we cut way back and we cut back and no one else did,” he said.

The companies may have to find new farmland to grow carrots. The average American now eats roughly seven pounds of the fresh vegetable every year, with consumption up 2% so far in 2023, according to NielsenIQ.

Grimmway has already expanded its farming operations outside of California with facilities in Florida, Washington and other states.

Butterfly’s Waglay doesn’t deny that water is one of the biggest barriers that his investment in Bolthouse faces. “Water challenges,” he said with a sigh. “This asset has great access to water, but it’s going to get worse and worse, and you need to be planning for that and trying to work on ways to minimize that. That’ll be a long-term challenge.”

California water fights often result in residents and smaller business owners getting “outgunned in the courts by large commercial actors,” Pomona College environmental analysis and politics professor Heather Williams, an expert on water issues, told Forbes. The lawsuit is among the first of many, she said.

“It’s put into motion a race to the basin — pumping as much as you can, and putting that into production,” Williams said. “Water is property in California. It’s what a rational actor acting on behalf of investors is going to do. If they’re playing this game, they’ve got to play hard.”

Grimmway and Bolthouse can move on, said Williams, unlike most of the residents in New Cuyama. “These are their homes, their small farms. If the well goes dry, it’s worth basically nothing,” she said. “They can’t pay lawyers for ten years of litigation.”

[mariacallous]

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On a 20-acre parcel outside the tiny Southern California town of New Cuyama, a 1.5-megawatt solar farm uses the sun’s rays to slowly charge nearly 600 batteries in nearby cabinets. At night, when energy demand rises, that electricity is sent to the grid to power homes with clean energy.

To make renewable energy from intermittent sources like solar and wind available when it is most needed, it’s becoming more common to use batteries to store the power as it’s generated and transmit it later. But one thing about the Cuyama facility, which began operations this month, is less common: The batteries sending energy to the grid once powered electric vehicles.

The SEPV Cuyama facility, located about two hours northeast of Santa Barbara, is the second hybrid storage facility opened by B2U Storage Solutions. Its first facility, just outside Los Angeles, uses 1,300 retired batteries from Honda Clarity and Nissan Leaf EVs to store 28 megawatt-hours of power, enough to power about 9,500 homes.

The facilities are meant to prove the feasibility of giving EV batteries a second life as stationary storage before they are recycled. Doing so could increase the sustainability of the technology’s supply chain and reduce the need to mine critical minerals, while providing a cheaper way of building out grid-scale storage.

“This is what’s needed at massive scale,” said Freeman Hall, CEO of the Los Angeles-based large-scale storage system company.

Electric vehicle batteries are typically replaced when they reach 70 to 80 percent of their capacity, largely because the range they provide at that point begins to dwindle. Almost all of the critical materials inside them, including lithium, nickel, and cobalt, are reusable. A growing domestic recycling industry, supported by billions of dollars in loans from the Energy Department and incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, is being built to prepare for what will one day be tens of millions of retired EV battery packs.

Before they are disassembled, however, studies show that around three-quarters of decommissioned packs are suitable for a second life as stationary storage. (Some packs may not have enough life left in them, are too damaged from a collision, or are otherwise faulty.)

“We were seeing the first generation of EVs end their time on the road, and 70 percent or more of those batteries have very strong residual value,” said Hall. “That should be utilized before all those batteries are recycled, and we’re just deferring recycling by three, four, or five years.”

Extending the useful life of EV batteries mitigates the impact of manufacturing them, said Maria Chavez, energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“The whole point of trying to deploy electric vehicles is to reduce emissions and reduce the negative impacts of things like manufacturing and extractive processes on our environment and our communities,” Chavez told Grist. “By extending the life of a battery, we reduce the need for further exploitation of our natural resources, we reduce the demand for raw materials, and we generally encourage a more sustainable process.”

Just as batteries have become crucial to reducing emissions from transportation, they’re also needed to fully realize the benefits of clean energy. Without stationary storage, wind and solar power can only feed the grid when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

“Being able to store it and use it when it’s most needed is a really important way to meet our energy needs,” Chavez said.

The use of utility-scale battery storage is expected to skyrocket, from 1.5 gigawatts of capacity in 2020 to 30 gigawatts by 2025. EV packs could provide a stockpile for that buildout. Hall said there are already at least 3 gigawatt-hours of decommissioned EV packs sitting around in the United States that could be deployed, and that the volume of them being removed from cars is doubling every two years.

“We’re going from a trickle when we started four years ago to a flood of batteries that are coming,” he said.

B2U says its technology allows batteries to be repurposed in a nearly “plug-and-play fashion.” They do not need to be disassembled, and units from multiple manufacturers—B2U has tested batteries from Honda, Nissan, Tesla, GM, and Ford—can be used in one system.

The packs are stored in large cabinets and managed with proprietary software, which monitors their safety and discharges and charges each battery based on its capacity. The batteries charge during the day from both the solar panels and the grid. Then B2U sells that power to utilities at night, when demand and prices are much higher.

Hall said using second-life batteries earns the same financial return as new grid-scale batteries at half the initial cost, and that for now, repurposing the packs is more lucrative for automakers than sending them straight to recyclers. Until the recycling industry grows, it’s still quite expensive to recycle them. By selling or leasing retired packs to a grid storage company, said Hall, manufacturers can squeeze more value out of them.

That could even help drive down the cost of electric vehicles, he added. “The actual cost of leasing a battery on wheels should go down if the full value of the battery is enhanced and reused,” he said. “Everybody wins when we do reuse in a smart fashion.”

B2U expects to add storage to a third solar facility near Palmdale next year. The facilities are meant to prove that the idea works, after which B2U plans to sell its hardware and software to other storage-project developers.

At the moment, though, planned deployment of the technology is limited. B2U predicts only about 6 percent of decommissioned EV batteries in the US will be used for grid-scale storage by 2027.

“People are skeptical, and they should be, because it’s hard to do reuse of batteries,” said Hall. “But we’ve got a robust data set that does prove reliability, performance, and profitability. We’re at a point where we really can scale this.”

[wingedjewels]

204026-IMG_4931 Brewer's Blackbird (Euphagus cyanocephalus) by Tony Morris Via Flickr: Cuyama Valley, 6/5/2006

[stumbleimg]

View of Mt. Pinos from Dry Canyon, Cuyama Badlands ~ Los Padres National Forest - Santa Barbara County, California [1800x1500] [OC]

[weather-usa]

Thunderstorms bring severe weather to multiple states, claiming a child's life, as heat scorches the West

Strong thunderstorms barreled across the central and eastern U.S. on Wednesday, reportedly claiming the life of a young child, triggering flood advisories, and causing a series of travel delays, while a heat dome baked California's Central Valley, other parts of the West, and southern Texas.

In Livonia, Michigan, a 2-year-old child was killed, and a 2-month-old infant and their mother were injured when a tree fell on their house amid high winds from a storm, according to WJBK-TV. The condition of the mother and baby, who were hospitalized, has not been detailed.

See more:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/196222201/Weather-Forecast-for-Illinois

Separate storms were set to roll over the Midwest, lower Plains, Ohio Valley, and the mid-Atlantic region throughout the day and into the night, according to the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center. By morning, flash flood warnings were in effect across parts of north-central Texas, northwestern Louisiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Philadelphia.

In Texas, the weather service in Fort Worth advised residents to stay indoors as floodwaters remained high and rivers were above flood stage. "Doppler radar indicated the heavy rain has largely come to an end, but it will take several hours for flood waters to recede," the weather service said. "Please do not travel unless you are sure roads are not flooded!"

In Oklahoma and Iowa, meteorologists warned of flooding along the banks, fields, and roads near rivers. Across Michigan and Ohio, forecasters said isolated wind damage throughout the afternoon would be the main storm threat.

Nearly 60,000 homes and businesses were without power across Texas late Wednesday afternoon, according to a USA TODAY outage tracker. Additionally, 59,000 utility customers in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota experienced outages, along with 26,000 in Mississippi.

Weather Forecast For North Carolina:

https://devpost.com/software/weather-forecast-for-north-carolina

At Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, more than 350 flights were delayed, and at least 45 were canceled Wednesday morning, according to FlightAware, a flight-tracking website. The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded all flights at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

Travel disruptions extended to the Northeast as well. Flights at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport were delayed by more than three hours on average, while Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey saw average delays exceeding two hours. Departure delays were also reported at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C.

Millions Under Heat Advisories

Climate and Average Weather Year Round in Kansas:

Much of the southwestern U.S., southern Texas, and California's Central Valley are under heat advisories as the first major heat wave of the summer brings anticipated record-breaking temperatures in the triple digits.

The National Weather Service in Los Angeles and Oxnard, California, forecasted temperatures up to 100 degrees across the Cuyama and Salinas valleys through the afternoon, as well as the Highway 14 corridor, which runs from Los Angeles to the northern Mojave Desert.

In the eastern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, temperatures were expected to reach the 90s to lower 100s. Heat advisories were also active across New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, where forecast temperatures approached or exceeded 100 degrees. In Las Vegas, the afternoon high temperature was expected to be between 107 and 114 degrees.

See more: https://weatherusa.app/zip-code/weather-35036

https://weatherusa.app/zip-code/weather-35038

https://weatherusa.app/zip-code/weather-35040

https://weatherusa.app/zip-code/weather-35041

https://weatherusa.app/zip-code/weather-35042

Southern Texas, which has faced unseasonably hot temperatures since late May, could see afternoon highs of 103 to 107 degrees. The heat index, or "feels like" temperature, could reach well over 110 degrees in some areas, including Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Uvalde, El Paso, and the Rio Grande Valley.

The extreme heat is expected to continue into the weekend.

[lareinedumondejeb]

The 2024 Cuyama Oaks xpride: Snow, rain, hail, and sunshine (Road to Tevis 111)

[atowndailynews]

Flood watch remains in effect in Atascadero

Photo of downtown Atascadero by reader Olan Kaigel. Additional .26 inches of rain in the forecast today – An additional .26 inches of rain is in the forecast again today for Atascadero. A flood watch remains in effect for all of Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo Counties except the Cuyama Valley and the far interior San Luis Obispo Valleys through Wednesday morning. Halcon Road in…

[newsokgr]

B2U Storage Solutions Announces Second Grid-Connected Hybrid Solar + Second-Life EV  Storage Facility 

LANCASTER, Calif., November 14, 2023 – B2U Storage Solutions, a leading provider of large scale energy storage systems using second-life electric vehicle (EV) batteries, announced today 6MWh of storage capacity is now operational at SEPV Cuyama, the company’s second hybrid  solar + storage facility, in New Cuyama, Santa Barbara County, CA. B2U will expand the facility  12MWh of storage capacity…

[unteriors-in-house-flipper-2]

(suggested by @cuyama)

Grant Street, Carson, North Dakota.

[ssolson8550]

Residents in the Cuyama Valley are boycotting carrots - Los Angeles Times

Water Wars: family farms V. corporate farms.

[hsquire]

The Long Lonely Road Highway 33 somewhere between Cuyama and Ojai California.

[spankiesblog]

Silent War (Live from Cuyama Valley, CA) Five Times August