Officials broke ground last week on a new federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles that will eventually fill a long-vacant lot on 1st and Broadway with a 600,000 square-foot building.

The new home of the U.S. District Court will be designed to use more solar heat and let in more natural light. It will also house several government agencies that serve the Central District of California, including the U.S. Marshals Service, U.We have a great selection of blown glass backyard solar landscape lights and solar garden light.S.Soli-lite provides the world with high-performance solar roadway and solar street lighting solutions. Attorneys' Office and the Federal Public Defender.

“It’s going to be a giant step forward in terms of its use of energy and leaving as small an environmental footprint as possible," said Langston Trigg, interim director for design and construction on the project. "It’ll be a very attractive addition to downtown Los Angeles.”

It will be a $319 million addition, which will also include increased security measures, a new cafeteria and more outdoor space. The building itself will look like a large cube.

"The shape of this courthouse, through its simplicity and luminous, Euclidean clarity, will define its role as an important and timeless civic addition to Los Angeles' governmental precinct," said project designer Craig Hartman, in a statement. "Its gardens, courtyards and civic plaza - accessible to all- will convey a generous sense of public-spiritedness."

But as one hole gets filled, another may be left empty — or at least a building left unused.How are solar outdoor lighting products different from other lighting, like fluorescent or incandescent? Trigg said that the GSA has not decided what to do with the old courthouse yet, or whether they will tear it down or fix it up.

Officials at the GSA previously told KPCC that the Spring Street courthouse has asbestos issues, security problems and is need of a seismic retrofit. All are issues that would need to be addressed if the building will be used for some other purpose.

The new courthouse should be completed by 2016. Crews are currently in the process of testing the soil and prepping the site for construction.

The grid's reliability is high, according to a May report from the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which sets standards and tracks the performance of the power plants and high-voltage transmission lines that make up the bulk power system. Last year was particularly good. Not including extreme weather events, major transmission lines caused power losses only twice in 2012, after averaging nine instances annually from 2008 to 2011.

The report says transmission lines have been functioning normally and available for use an average of 99.6 percent of the time, not including for planned outages, since tracking began three years ago.

Most outages residents experience stem not from the bulk system, but from smaller failures in distribution systems managed by local utilities and regulated by states. Not including storm-related outages, the average U.S. customer goes without power 1.2 times annually for a total of 112 minutes, according to PA Consulting Group.

The bulk power system is changing, a result of the declining use of coal and nuclear power and the rising use of natural gas and renewable power.

One-sixth of the existing coal capacity is projected to close by 2020, much of it at small, inefficient units in the Ohio River Valley, the Mid-Atlantic and the Southeast, according to the Energy Information Administration. The permanent closure of four nuclear reactors in California, Florida and Wisconsin was announced this year, and reactors in New York, Vermont and elsewhere may also close.

Plant shutdowns mean there's less of a cushion in electrical capacity when power demand is high or problems arise. Shutdowns also create pockets of transmission congestion or regions where power is scarce. Both situations drive up power prices for customers, make the grid less stable and present planning challenges.

"That is a new stress that we hadn't thought about" a decade ago,How does a solar charger work and where would you use a solar charger? said Scott Moore,A solar bulb that charges up during the day and lights the night when the sun sets. vice president of transmission engineering and project services at American Electric Power, one of the nation's biggest utilities.

The reliability report raises concerns about the Texas grid, one of the three major U.S. grids, where the amount of wiggle room in capacity is expected to dip below targeted minimum levels.

Growing reliance on natural gas-fired generation also creates weak spots.

For example, utilities that supply natural gas to customers for heat can typically take all the gas they need from pipelines before any excess goes to electricity generators. In regions with limited pipeline capacity, such as the Northeast, planners say there might not be enough gas to heat homes and generate electricity simultaneously during a cold snap.

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