On the same day as SB 401 revived as SB 459 gets a hearing in a better committee, Georgia Power trots out the same old tired disinformation it’s been peddling for years. As if we didn’t already know that almost all solar installations in Georgia are installed by certified solar installers. Or that pretty much every inverter these days comes with built-in automatic cutoff if the grid goes down to which installers add air-gap cutoff knife switches plus breakers. And as if Georgia Power didn’t know it and EMCs could charge a percentage on electricity arbitraged across their networks, which gapower could use to finance any needed grid improvements, while retaining a hefty profit for doing not much of anything else. Meanwhile, those of us who chose to participate in solar electricity arbitrage would get lower rates for customers. We do know all that, but maybe your state senator doesn’t, so maybe you should call your senator today and tell them you want to be able to buy and sell solar power without having to get it from the utility monopoly.

Greg Roberts, Vice President of Pricing and Planning for Georgia Power in Atlanta, wrote for the Savannah Morning News today, The solar sleight of hand. I’ll only quote part of his concluding paragraph.

Georgia Power is involved in many efforts to expand the use solar energy

Usually dragged along behind reluctantly, as in when it took Georgia Power a month or more to connect an installation in Valdosta after the solar panels and inverters were installed in less than a week.

and currently has over 55 megawatts of solar power in its portfolio of generating sources to serve all customers without significant rate impacts.

Mostly because the PSC forced gapower to do that, overriding Georgia Power’s lobbying for once.

Or maybe instead that was a trade for the PSC letting Georgia Power charge Construction Work in Progress for the two nukes its parent company The Southern Company is building, and for Georgia Power being able to pass all nuke cost overruns on to customers. Does that sound like an even trade to you?

What do you want to do? What gapower recommends:

We should proceed with caution, take the time to evaluate all the pros and cons thoroughly….

Or maybe we should look at what 46 other states have already done, pick what works, and get on with it. That plus build on what our home-grown inventors and entrepeneurs such as Drs. Smith and Godbey are already doing.

Oh, my: Greg Roberts is responsible for Market Planning and Resource Policy and Planning. Well, that’s too bad. Georgia Power could be generating a lot of solar energy itself and selling it to more northerly states. Or profiting from collecting percentages on distributed generation without even having to finance or install the generating capacity. Come on up to the 21^st century, Georgia Power!

-jsq

PS: No snails were harmed in the making of this post. And apologies to their entire genus for the comparison.

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