by admin / Posted: May 15, 2012 · /
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Are you tired of seeing those ugly looking electricity pylons splitting up some of the nice farm land around Texas. A great thing about Texas is the opportunity from population and job growth. One of the negatives is because of this expansion the Texas imminent domain law sometimes must be used to buy up strips of land to install electricity lines and those big ugly metal electricity pylons.
What if the state of Texas could offer these people something cool instead of your basic metal pole? Maybe the cool factor and beautification of having an electric pylon in the shape of a deer, bear, Texas longhorn cattle or something else would lessen the heart sinking feeling of having your farmland “uglified” with big electricity pylon poles.
Check out some of these electricity pylon ideas below. I can see how this could really spruce up the look of these ugly things. If your farmland in Texas was about to get electricity pylons installed would you opt for one of these designs or would you want the standard pole?
by admin / Posted: May 2, 2012 · /
Category:
Energy Future Holdings is the Dallas based company that controls TXU and if you remember was the entity purchased in the largest leveraged private equity buyout in U.S. history. The Energy Future Holdings private equity buyout now ranks as the number 2 biggest ever as RJR Nabisco beat them out. The deal was a cool $44.37 billion to buy up Energy Future Holdings by buyers KKR, TPG, and Goldman Sachs.
The former secretary of the state was appointed to run this big massive company and now facing a 5th consecutive quarterly loss I start to wonder about the too big to fail concept. Is this loan guaranteed by the government in one way or another. How does this get handled if government has to step in?
I kind of doubt these companies would get into this buyout if there weren’t some pretty strong guarantees in place for this leveraged loan.
Being burdened by all this debt Fitch Ratings downgraded Energy Future Holdings’ debt to 8 levels below junk and said a default is very likely a possibility.
The company faces increasing troubles in trying to generate cash and their debt is only going up along with their interest payments. Sales fell 27% to $1.22 billion in the first quarter and interest expenses increased 22% to $785 million from a year earlier.
I wonder who has a protective stake in this buyout and what investors will end up being screwed? The report seemed to blame falling power prices on EFH’s downfall so far. I wonder if the problem has anything to do with the EPA and environmental activists that stopped all those state of the art coal power plants that were expected to be built by TXU?
Power generation is a big part of the EFH business. Their retail side, TXU, sells retail electricity service but this is a carefully balanced business that has other worries unrelated to the generation side of the business.
Trying to keep this big company going with all the government regulation and competitive deregulated market in Texas seems like a huge undertaking and add to that the pressure of all that debt.
I see this as a long uphill climb into positive territory.
I will be sigining up with...
