A Georgia Senate committee needs to take it up
a bill that would greatly ease financing
solar power for your housetop or business roof.
Sen. Jack Murphy is the chair, and you can contact him today.
GA SB 51,
The Georgia Cogeneration and Distributed Generation Act,
was read to the Senate 16 January 2013
and referred to the Committee on
Regulated Industries and Utilities.
Here’s contact information for the Chair of that Committee:
Tabled! The applicant requested and the Commission unanimously voted
to table
the proposed closing of Old State Road to Hotchkiss Crossing
on the Alapaha River
until their next meeting, which is in two weeks, Tuesday 26 February 2013.
A waste company executive suddenly rescheduled so he could come back
and apologize to the public.
All this and 3 rezonings and 3 contracts at the Lowndes County Commission
Regular Session Tuesday 12 February 2013, plus people haven’t forgotten
about animal shelter issues.
Here’s
the agenda,
with links to the videos, and a few notes.
See also the videos of the
Work Session of the previous morning.
LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
PROPOSED AGENDA
WORK SESSION, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2013, 8:30 a.m.
REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2013, 5:30 p.m.
327 N. Ashley Street — 2nd Floor
My op-ed in the VDT today; I’ve added links, plus some more after the op-ed.
Finally! Kewaunee, Calvert Cliffs, and now Crystal River
permanently closing say it’s time for Georgia to stop wasting money
on Southern Company’s already over-budget and increasingly-late
nukes and get on with solar power and wind off the coast: for
jobs, for energy independence, and for clean air and plenty of
clean water.
- February 2013:
Duke Energy is closing the Crystal River nuclear
reactor
(Tampa Bay Times, 6 Feb 2013),
160 miles south of us, because
nobody wants to pay to fix it:
between “$1.5 billion and $3.4 billion,
plus what it costs to buy power to replace
what Crystal River would have produced while it is
being repaired”
[Charlotte Business Journal, 11 Jan 2013].- November 2012:
NRC terminated Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs 3
(NRC 1 Nov 2012)
after
Constellation Energy dropped out because the cost “is too high
and creates too much risk for Constellation”
[Bloomberg 10 Oct 2010].
Instead of demonstrating to influence legislators, sometimes it's better
to get elected and legislate: that's what Kyle Jones did in Maine,
and he closed the Maine Yankee nuke,
de-monopolized the state's electrical utilities,
and instituted a 30% renewable energy goal.
All this was helped by the nuclear industry's own incompetence.
Bangor Daily News, Page A2, 28 May 1997,
Maine Yankee plant may be closed down: Owners weigh repair costs, deregulation,
Cracking in the plant's steam generator tubes, which carry the superheated,
radioactive water, was first discovered in 1990.
In 1994, Main Yankee officials predicted that the plant's problems
were over after they plugged more than 300 of the cracked tubes.
However, testing of the tubes during a shutdown for refueling in 1995
revealed as many as 10,000 additional cracked tubes.
Sounds a lot like
San Onofre.
At the time, it was estimated that permanently shutting down
the plant would cost at least $316 million while,
after 23 years of operation, Maine Yankee had collected only
$100 million to pay for its decommissioning. The most recent
estimate for decommissioning is $369 million, of which
only $169 million has been raised as of this month.Facing the accumulation of these engineering and operational difficulties,
the owners of the plant signaled a departure from business-as-usual
and, earlier this year, brought in the New Orleans-based Entergy Corp.
to provide management services at Maine Yankee.
Oh, my!
The same Entergy that's now
likely to close Vermont Yankee.
And Vermont Yankee wasn’t the first to follow this financial path to closure:
Seen today on the
WACE facebook page
is an image of an op-ed in the VDT, and alongside it I include here
Michael Noll’s initial comments, plus a few links.
There is good reason why Stephen Hawkins once said “the greatest
enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of
knowledge.” When entities like Fox News can claim that “solar won’t
work in America because it’s not as sunny as Germany”, we shouldn’t
be surprised by the results of such “educational” efforts. The fact
is that we have a number of clean and renewable forms of energy
(e.g. wind, solar, geothermal) that already work. Just go to
Spain,
Germany,
Denmark, Iceland, or simply stay in the US and visit places
like from
New Jersey
and
New York
to
California
and
Arizona. Combine
these pieces of a larger energy puzzle with meaningful initiatives
of
energy conservation and energy efficiency, and we find a way out
of our current predicament (i.e. continuing dependence on finite and
dirty sources of energy), while saving money (see
solar vs. nuclear),
preserving our natural resources (e.g. water, forests),
and providing clean, healthy and safe environments to live in (e.g.
wind and solar do not produce radioactive waste, pollute our air and
groundwater).The guest columnist appearing above is the same individual who
thought
As promised,
a bipartisan bill was filed Thursday to stop Georgia Power from
charging for nuclear cost overruns on Plant Vogtle; this could free up some financing for Georgia to move ahead on solar and wind power.
A BILL to be entitled an Act to amend Code Section 46-2-25 of the
Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to the procedure for
changing any rate, charge, classification, or service and the
recovery of financing costs, so as to change the calculation used
under certain circumstances to determine the costs of financing
associated with the construction of a nuclear generating plant that
a utility may recover from its customers; to provide for related
matters; to provide an effective date; to repeal conflicting laws;
and for other purposes.
The bill would add this text to Georgia Code:
…provided, however, that in the event the amounts recorded in the
utility’s construction work in progress accounts plus the amount of
all financing costs accrued on any construction work in progress
accounts exceeds the costs approved by the commission in the
original certificate of the nuclear generating plant granted under
Code Section 46-3A-5, the cost of equity portion of the financing
costs shall be calculated using a rate no higher than the utility’s
actual cost of debt.
Let’s see what Georgia Power does to fight this one.
So far, it’s
Seen Monday.
Seems to me that instead of burning trees
tree farmers should start growing solar farms
on some of their less useful land.
Forest Bioenergy Conference —GFA
Deadline for early registration is Sunday, February 10…register
today to save money!
It’s 21 February 2013 in Forsyth.
Interest in forest biomass as a potential feedstock for renewable
energy facilities has been especially keen for the past several
years and much of the activity has been centered in Georgia. GFA and
UGA are excited about hosting our fourth biennial conference to
examine where we are with forest bioenergy development in Georgia
and where we may be going in the near future. While many issues are
becoming clearer, much uncertainty remains with regard to government
policy and market prices for fossil fuels. This conference is an
excellent opportunity to hear from some of the players on the front
lines of developing markets, influencing government policies, and
conducting research on how these changes may impact our wood supply
system.These are some of the topics that will be addressed during this
conference by many of the people directly involved with these
changes that are taking place in our state. Join us and stay abreast
of these significant changes taking place in our forest industry.
The talk I think they should pay attention to is:
What does Low-Cost Natural Gas Mean for Future Biomass Use?
Finally!
The reactor
only 160 miles from here
that
nobody wanted to pay to fix
is closing for good: Duke is closing Crystal River.
After Kewaunee and Crystal River closing, which one is next?
San Onofre?
The never-opened Vogtle 3 and 4?
Ivan Penn wrote for Tampa Bay Times today,
Duke Energy announces closing of Crystal River nuclear power plant,
Duke Energy announced early Tuesday it will permanently close the
Crystal River nuclear plant that has been shut down since late 2009.
The company said it is reviewing alternatives, including building a
new natural gas plant, to replace the power produced by the nuclear
facility.Duke's four coal-fired plants will remain in service at the same
Citrus County complex where the nuclear plant, known as CR3, is
located.
How about they build
offshore wind farms
and solar farms
instead, like
TEPCO is doing near Fukushima?
Those can be built on time and on budget, use no fuel, and cause no pollution.
And how about
rooftop solar for jobs and energy independence?
There's more in
the article,
including this:
As
anticipated,
Georgia Power released
that
20-year energy plan Thursday,
because they have file one every three years with the PSC.
It includes far less solar power than tiny little far-north-of-here
Denmark is busily deploying.
The good news:
Georgia Power is closing a bunch of coal plants.
And this plan makes a nod towards
"demand response programs, energy efficiency programs, pricing
tariffs and other activities".
The bad news:
they're replacing those coal plants with natural gas, and of course
"two new state-of-the-art nuclear facilities at Plant Vogtle";
you know, the two
Georgia Power has been charging customers for since 2009
while they deliver no electricity.
Georgia Power
can't even seem to deliver the reactor containment vessels.
But what about renewable energy?
Do you know how many outages nuclear reactors near here have had?
Probably not, because that’s usually not in the news,
and you have to dig into day by day NRC reactor status reports
to find out.
It turns out nuclear power is 0/7 instead of 24/7 on many a day.
Looking at all nine
nuclear reactors within 200 miles of here,
the graph drips downtime like tears.
The available data on NRC’s website and graphed here goes back to 31 March 2006,
through 29 January 2013.
Let’s look at each of our closest reactors one by one. Hatch 1 on the Altamaha River,
in addition to its recent
40% power on 21 January and 87% on 5 January,
has had quite a few outages:
