Iowa is rejecting CWIP, and Georgia can, too.
Here’s why.

Herman K. Trabish wrote for Green Tech Media 22 February 2012,

The Nuclear Industry’s Answer to Its Marketplace Woes:
Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) financing shifts the risks of nuclear energy to utility ratepayers,

A sign of the nuclear industry’s difficult situation in the
aftermath of Fukushima is a proposal before the Iowa legislature

“Construction Work in Progress was intended to circumvent the core consumer protection of the regulatory decision-making process,”

that would allow utility MidAmerican Energy Holdings, a subsidiary
of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, to build a new nuclear
facility in the state using Construction Work in Progress (CWIP)
financing (also called advanced cost recovery).

“Investment in nuclear power is the antithesis of the kind of


investments you would want to make under the current uncertain
conditions,” explained nuclear industry authority Mark Cooper,
a senior fellow for economic analysis at Vermont Law School’s
Institute for Energy and the Environment. “They cannot raise
the capital to build these plants in normal markets under the normal
regulatory structures.”

CWIP would allow the utility to raise the money necessary to build a
nuclear power plant by billing ratepayers in advance of and during
construction.

“Construction Work in Progress was intended to circumvent the


core consumer protection of the regulatory decision-making
process,” Cooper explained. “It exposes ratepayers to
all the risk.” The nuclear industry’s answer to its
post-Fukushima challenges, he said, “is to simply rip out the
heart of consumer protection and turn the logic of capital markets
on their head.”

And the Iowa Utilities Board staff agreed with Cooper and recommended against CWIP.

His message to policymakers is simple, Cooper said. “This is
an investment you would not make with your own money. Therefore, you
should not make it with the ratepayers’ money.”

Meanwhile, in Georgia:

Vogtle has just been licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
(NRC), causing a stir among environmental activists. To Cooper, the
NRC’s decision on Vogtle was “a non-event” because, he
said, “The morning after the license was issued, nobody on
Wall Street woke up and said, ‘Hey! Now I’m going to buy in!'” The
licensing decision had, he said, “no effect on the
economics.”

More significantly, he added, the Obama administration has not
advanced the Vogtle $8.33 billion federal loan guarantee that has
been on hold since last year because of the budget and schedule
problems.

“The Obama administration talks about nuclear power,”
Cooper said, “but it has stopped putting the people’s money
where their mouth is.”

And the people of Georgia can demand Georgia Power stop putting
its customers money where its mouth is by demanding an end to CWIP.

What can we do for power instead?

Cooper pointed out that renewables are an economically viable
alternative to nuclear power. “They always say it’s hard to do
renewables and it’s hard to convince people to do efficiency,”
he explained. “But then they always assume it’s easy to build
nuclear. And it’s not.”

“Base load,” Cooper said, “is so 20th
century.” Given “the sum total of the tools we have for
integrating resources and managing the grid,” he explained,
“it is time for utilities that are not transitioning to grow
up and adopt some new technology.”

New technology like

Dr. Sidney Smith has already developed
with his electric meters to enable a commodity market in solar power,
to provide lower rates for customers, resilient power sources, energy independence, and profit for all involved.
Georgia Power could stop being a 20^th drag
and become a 21^st century leader.
Or, if gapower won’t lead, we can tell it to get out of the way
so we can get on with distributed renewable energy.

-jsq