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 21st century, Georgia Power!
-jsq
PS: No snails were harmed in the making of this post.
And apologies to their entire genus for the comparison.