After several of Mississippi’s top officials, including Gov. Tate Reeves, criticized a new program designed to incentivize the growth of solar energy in schools and residential areas, the Mississippi Public Service Commission met today to reaffirm its support for the policy. Critics claim it will raise energy costs for customers statewide.
“The free world deserves better than this modern-day Adolf Hitler,” Sen. Roger Wicker said. “If Vladimir Putin’s recent words and deeds have a haunting familiarity, it is because they are directly out of the Nazi madman’s notebook.”
Mississippi Power executives and political backers and lobbyists pushed a huge moonshot of an idea back in 2006 to turn low-grade lignite into “clean coal” to provide electricity from its Kemper County plant in east Mississippi. They also used new legislation to force ratepayers to fund the experiment in advance—funds they later had to repay before imploding part of the facility on Oct. 9, 2021, 15 years after hatching the plan.
Mississippi leaders reflected this morning on the life of Colin Powell, the four-star general who served as the nation’s first Black secretary of state, after news of his death broke this morning. U.S. House Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat who represents Mississippi’s Second Congressional District and chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, called Powell “the best example of a true patriot.”
Tropical Storm Ida has lost much of its initial power after landfall, but it continues to scale Mississippi, bringing harsh winds and heavy rainfall to areas along the coast and southwestern portion of the state.
Mississippi will see the largest solar energy farm in the state’s history constructed near Clay and Lowndes County, a 200-megawatt farm intended to supply renewable energy to cities across the southeast, including Starkville and Knoxville, Tenn.
As Mississippi recovers from the worst winter storm since the mid-1990s, Northern District Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley is calling for a re-evaluation of Mississippi’s membership in its regional transmission organization, which manages the transmission, sale and conservation of power across multiple states.
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