Category Archives: Renewable Energy

Solar Effingham County

Somebody wants to build a solar farm in Effingham County, Georgia,
has found a location suitable for Georgia Power’s Advanced Solar Initiative
program, and is asking the Effingham County Commission to agree.


HMP Solar
This item is on the

May 7th and

May 21st 2013 agendas for the Effingham County Commission:

VI Appearance 5:30 p.m. HMP Solar

Effingham County also has online

Meeting Documents
for each meeting.
The

Meeting Documents for May 21st include this memo from their
zoning administrator: Continue reading →

Solar park in Ontario –GDF Suez



If a French energy utility can put a 10 megawatt
solar park in Ontario, more than a thousand miles north of here,
why is Southern Company still locating all its new solar installations
in western states and none in Georgia?
GDF Suez is starting the new Suez Canal of solar energy.
What are Southern Company and Georgia Power doing?

Enerzine.com posted today,

GDF Suez met en service son premier parc solaire au Canada,
GDF Suez commissioned its first solar park in Canada,

A consortium of GDF Suez Canada, Japan’s Mitsui, and Fiera Axium
Infrastructure Tuesday announced the commissioning of a solar
photovoltaic farm in Brockville, Ontario, with an installed capacity of 10 MW.

The solar park is comprised of 42,000 solar panels spread over an
area of over 32 hectares [79 acres], enough to generate electricity for about
1,700 homes.

The proposed $50 million project benefited from the Feed-in Tarriff (FIT) program.
The electricity produced will be sold to the local company in
charge of Energy, Ontario Power Authority, for a period of 20
years.

“With Brockville, we diversify our technology base and
enter a new and exciting field. We are proud to provide another
form of clean, renewable energy to the province and we hope this
will be the first of a list of many solar projects,” said Mike
Crawley President of GDF Suez Canada.

The project located in Brockville, Leeds County is the first solar power
plant operated by the joint venture in Canada. The consortium
currently operates in Canada 362 MW of wind power. Other wind
projects with a total capacity (300 MW) is under construction in
Ontario and British Columbia.

Translation mostly by google translate with a few touches by me.

-jsq

Privatize TVA? Southern Company would like that



The hydropower assets of the Tennessee Valley Authority
would give Southern Company a way to avoid doing distributed solar for a while.
Will SO CEO Tom Fanning and Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers
bit the bullet and go straight for distributed solar instead of
helping Duke privatize TVA for a short-term stopgap that would
set both of them farther behind the disruptive solar curve?


SolarCity and Southern Company stock

Blue line: SCTY; red line: SO, chart by
Google Finance.

May 16th:

Goldman Sachs invested $500 million in SCTY.

May 22nd:

SO stockholder meeting.

May 24th:

S&P downgrades SO.

Wes Patoka wrote for Motley Fool 24 May 2013,

Who Benefits the Most if the TVA Is Privatized,

Continue reading →

SolarCity disrupting utilities in Massachusetts; how about Georgia?

Why is great big Southern Company afraid of tiny SolarCity?
Look at these 2.6KW of solar panels on a house in Bedford, Massachusetts.
Think about much more sun in Georgia, financed by Google and

Goldman Sachs,
turning into
votes for solar power.
Big coal and nuclear boondoggles already

don’t look so attractive anymore to investors.

By Giles Parkinson wrote for Reneweconomy on 9 October 2012,

SolarCity’s big challenge: Prove that energy bills can fall,


A 2.6kW SolarCity installation in Bedford, Massachusetts
SolarCity sees the traditional utilities as their biggest
competition. “We compete with them on price, predictability of
price and the ease by which customers can switch to electricity
generated by solar systems,” it says.

“We have disrupted the industry status quo by providing
renewable energy directly to customers for less than they are
currently paying for utility-generated energy. Unlike utilities, we
sell energy with a predictable cost structure that does not rely on
limited fossil fuels and is insulated from rising retail electricity
prices. As retail prices for electricity increase and distributed
solar energy costs decline, our market opportunity will grow
exponentially.”


Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Anthony Kim said the SolarCity
filing could be a “game-changing moment for the solar
industry” because it shows “how plummeting component
costs benefit a company operating on the downstream side of the
solar business.”

That article was posted before SolarCity’s stock went public, and
before

Goldman Sachs invested half a billion dollars in SolarCity.
Six months later, we know Southern Company and Georgia Power
are paying attention, because both SO CEO Tom Fanning and
Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers said so at the

Southern Company stockholder meeting.

-jsq

Kemper Coal Crashes Southern Company Rating and Stock Price



Standard & Poor’s lowered Southern Company’s rating from stable to negative
because of the risks of Kemper Coal in Mississippi, and SO’s stock price plummetted.
This was immediately after

activists grilled SO on that and other topics
at the

SO stockholder meeting.
Wait ’till S&P catches on to the risks of SO’s

19-months-late and $1 billion-over-budget nukes at Plant Vogtle in Georgia!
Or SO’s non-action so far on

the challenge of distributed solar.

Kristin Jones wrote for WSJ 24 May 2013,

S&P Lowers Outlook on Southern Co., Noting Project Risks,

Continue reading →

Video of Southern Company shareholders meeting @ SO 2013-05-22



Here’s

Southern Company’s own video
of the
22 May 2013 shareholders meeting.
More detail will follow on the record number of questions,
and CEO Tom Fanning’s answers, in addition to this one already posted.

-jsq

UK biomass plant exploded from Waycross wood pellets

Explosions in Tilbury, England, explosions in Waycross:
south Georgia wood pellet dust blowing up here and there and
producing CO2 when burned there.
Why is
“the world’s largest wood pellet plant”
a better use of Georgia foresters’ resources than solar farms,
which don’t pollute and don’t explode?



Josh Schlossberg wrote for The Biomass Monitor 24 May 2013,

Biomass Industry Plays With Fire, Gets Burned,

A massive fire raged inside wood pellet silos for RWE’s Tilbury
Power Station in Essex, UK, on February 27, 2012. The biomass
incinerator—the largest in the world at 750
megawatts—had just been converted from coal to woody biomass a
month earlier. RWE claims no single cause can be attributed to the
fire, but suspects that smoldering wood pellets triggered the dust
fire.



In a recent editorial (apparently not online),

Robert Farris
Executive Director of the

Georgia Forestry Commission,
wrote that Georgia has nine wood pellet plants.
He didn’t name them, but
Biomass Magazine has
a list of U.S. wood pellet plants,
including these in Georgia (I added the City column): Continue reading →

Nuclear reactor percent power from NRC data

Do nuclear reactors really deliver dependable baseload capacity?
I hear industry execs say 99.99% uptime.
The real average from seven years of NRC data for 104 reactors is 88.13%.


Vogtle 1
According to Power Reactor Status Reports
posted online by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
here are the actual percent power percentages over time
for the 104 listed nuclear power reactors.
The timeframe is 31 March 2006 through today, 21 May 2013.
(The NRC data appears to go back to 1999, but seven years
is a good sample to start with.)
The computation for each reactor is the sum of the uptime
percentages for each day divided by the number of days.
The total uptime is the sum of the reactor uptimes divided
by the number of reactors.
Here’s the list, sorted two ways:

Continue reading →

Content in today’s Industrial Authority agenda! @ VLCIA 2013-05-21

Names of projects!


Lists of PR and marketing items!
Is this a new trend from our Industrial Authority?
Or will it be like

the last time I complimented them on an agenda with content
and was told later that one was an accident.

Here’s

the agenda.
Sure, the project names are codewords, but that’s how they talk to
prospective companies without revealing all their cards to the competition.
And this one has a name:

Maybe we’ll hear more about those

two megawatts of solar power.
Maybe even more are scheduled for Lowndes County.

Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority

Agenda, Tuesday, May 21, 2013 5:30 p.m.

Industrial Authority Conference Room

2110 N. Patterson Street

Continue reading →

Solar Fedex in Buffalo

How many of the distribution centers here have solar panels on top?
Or schools?
Or government buildings?
Or businesses?
None.
But sunny far-north-next-to-Canada Buffalo has them.



David Robinson wrote for Buffalo News 14 May 2013,

FedEx groundbreaking gives region bragging rights:
FedEx Trade Networks breaks ground on a new distribution center that development officials hope will lure more companies, jobs

FedEx Trade Networks began construction Tuesday on its new
distribution center in the Town of Tonawanda, giving hope to local
development officials that the company’s expansion will boost the
Buffalo Niagara region’s efforts to become a distribution and
logistics hub.

“It really drives home the value of this region as a center
for logistics in the global economy,” said Kenneth Adams,
president and chief executive officer of Empire State Development,
the state’s main economic development agency.

“It plays to the inherent strength of the region,” Adams
said. “There could be no better seal of approval for a
logistics business in this location.”

We’ve got transportation and logistics and distribution centers here,
but we don’t have this:

Fred Schardt, president of FedEx Trade Networks, said the
environmental benefits of the company’s 14-acre site within the
Riverview Solar Technology Park off River Road also were a selling
point. “We understand the importance of doing business in an
environmentally sustainable way. It’s very, very important for
us,” he said. “This park allows this to happen.”

The FedEx building will include a 100-kilowatt solar array that will
be integrated into the design of the structure. Those solar panels
are expected to generate 1 million kilowatt-hours of electricity
during the term of the company’s lease, reducing the company’s
consumption of fossil fuels by the equivalent of 80,000 gallons of
gasoline, Montante said.

If Buffalo, a thousand miles to the north with much less sun,
can do this, we can, too.
Maybe if we did this, maybe in some of VLCIA’s industrial parks,
maybe it would attract more businesses….

-jsq