Tag Archives: cost overruns

Mississippi PSC required spending docs for Kemper Coal: what about Plant Vogtle?

Maybe Georgia PSC could do about Georgia Power’s nuclear Plant Vogtle
what Mississippi PSC did about Mississippi Power’s Kemper Coal:
hold their parent Southern Company accountable for cost overruns.
And for pipelines!

Sam R. Hall blogged for Daily Ledes 1 November 2013,

Sources: U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz to visit Kemper coal plant,

The PSC voted unanimously to require Mississippi Power to provide
additional documents justifying their spending on the Kemper plant.
The hearing is set for May 2014, when the plant was originally
supposed to go online.

“If the PSC rejects some of the spending as imprudent, it
could add to the $1 billion in costs that shareholders have already
agreed to absorb,” the Associated Press reported last month.

Meanwhile, GA PSC Continue reading →

GA PSC abdicates cost oversight for new nukes at Plant Vogtle

Finish it and then send we the taxpayers and ratepayers a bill?
What kind of deal is that?
So Southern Company already
dodged a Fitch downgrade by delaying
a decision, and now GA PSC wants to put it off for years more.
That also delays solar deployment in Georgia, putting us still farther behind.

Ray Henry wrote for AP yesterday,

Ga. approves deal on nuclear plant costs,

A debate over the rising cost of building a nuclear power plant in
Georgia will be delayed for years under an agreement approved
Tuesday by Georgia’s utility regulators.

The elected members of Georgia’s Public Service Commission
unanimously approved a deal that will put off a decision on whether
Georgia Power can raise its budget for building two more nuclear
reactors at Plant Vogtle (VOH’-gohl) until the first of those
reactors is finished. An independent state monitor has estimated the
first reactor will be finished in January 2018 at the earliest.

Regulators will continue monitoring company spending but will not
make a decision on raising the bottom line budget figure.

So GA PSC will keep watching costs run over budget but will do nothing
about it.

Oh, wait, it’s actually worse: Continue reading →

Climate change adversely affecting U.S. power grid

Yes, and moving away from baseload coal, nukes, and natural gas
and towards distributed solar and wind power will help with that,
both directly by making the grid more resilient, and indirectly
by slowing climate change.

Clare Foran wrote for NationalJournal 12 August 2013,
Climate Change Is Threatening the Power Grid:

So says the White House, in a new report that recommends strengthening the grid.

Just days away from the 10-year anniversary of the worst power
outage in U.S. history, the White House and the Energy Department
released a report on Monday evaluating the resiliency of the
nation’s electric grid and recommending steps to prevent future
blackouts.

The report called storms and severe weather “the leading cause of
power outages in the United States,” and warned against the steep
cost of weather-related damage to the electric grid. It put the
price tag for electrical failures caused by inclement weather at
between $18 billion and $33 billion annually, and noted that costs
have increased in recent years, jumping from a range of $14 billion
to $26 billion in 2003 to $27 billion to $52 billion in 2012. Storms
exceeding a billion dollars in damages (electrical and otherwise)
have also become more frequent in the past decade, as the chart
below shows.

Well,
Entergy’s Arkansas Nuclear 1 (ANO1) is still down

more than four months after a fatal accident
(hey,

look at that; Continue reading →

GA PSC member ties Plant Vogtle nuke cost overruns to Kemper Coal in Mississippi

If Georgia Power stonewalls on cost overruns, will it lose
at least one Commissioner this time?

Long-time nuclear supporter Tim Echols suggested at

the hearings this morning
that cost overruns at nuclear Plant Vogtle should be capped like Southern Company
was forced to do for Kemper Coal by the Mississippi PSC.
Standard & Poor’s already

downgraded SO because of Kemper Coal
and two analysts have

downgraded SO for sticking to coal and nukes instead of doing more solar and wind.
If SO’s majority part Georgia Power loses the GA PSC, it could be curtains
for Plant Vogtle’s new nukes.

Ray Henry wrote for AP this morning,

Southern Co. challenged on nuclear plant costs,

Southern Co. subsidiary Georgia Power has asked to raise the budget
for its share of massive project by $737 million to roughly $6.85
billion.

Public Service Commission Tim Echols asked whether the firm has
considered offering a deal like one it reached in Mississippi over a
separate plant that also proved expensive to build. The company has
absorbed $540 million in losses in Mississippi and could face more.

Remember, Tim Echols has for two years now been Continue reading →

Southern Company only building nukes because they’re not paying, we are –Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy said he’d be for nukes if they were safe or economical, but they are neither, while solar and wind are both.

After calling

the pro-nuke movie Pandora’s Promise a hoax,
he addressed “safe” by pointing out the movie’s
claimed former anti-nuke leaders were
never leaders while major nuclear utility executives
are indeed now anti-nuke leaders.
(For example, I met

former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman
in DC where he was testifying against nukes.)
Then Kennedy tore into

Southern Company’s three-legged nuclear boondoggle
and pointed out solar and wind are winning even against massive distortions
in the economic playing field caused by public service commissions
letting regulated utilities make the rest of us pay for their profits
on uneconomic nukes.

Andrew Revkin posted on Youtube 19 June 2013,

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Director of Pandora’s Promise Spar Over Nuclear Power,

The last nuclear power plant constructed in the world was in Finland.
It cost about $11 billion a gigawatt.
Now I’m involved with construction right now of one of the largest
power plants that’s in north America which is in the Mojave Desert,
and it’s

a solar thermal plant, and it’s costing about $3 billion a
gigawatt….

There’s no individual and there’s no merchant utility that will build
a nuclear power plant, because they’re so expensive.
You can’t make money on it.
The only ones who will build them are regulated utilities like
the Southern Company in Georgia… because
they make money by spending money.
They get reimbursed for their capital costs plus 12 or 15% per year.
So they’ll construct it
once they get approval from the public utility commission.
Then they want to spend as much money on their capital costs
because they’re not paying for it.
You and I are paying for it.

I don’t think Bill Gates, or I saw Paul Allen was one of the
funders of this film, that they’re going to spend their own money
building one of these [nuclear] plants….

You could make energy by burning prime rib,
but why would you take the most expensive way to do it.

And by last fall, the cost per gigawatt of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels

was already under $3 billion per gigawatt
so distributed solar PV makes just as much sense as massive desert
thermal solar, and both make far more economic sense than nuclear.
Plus costs of solar PV keep going down, pushing solar deployments
up like compound interest, while nukes always take years to build
and

always cost more than budgeted.

Southern Company is the king of nuke cost overruns, going

26 times overbudget per unit on Vogtle 1 and 2
and already

19 months late and about a billion dollarsoverbudget on Vogtle 3 and 4.
Then there are the safety issues: a failed nuke can be Chernobyl
or Fukushima and many nukes

leak radioactive tritium into groundwater
and vent radiation into the air, while a failed solar plant is
a bunch of glass.

I got into the [solar] industry
to show that there was an alternative and that the alternative
was economically viable.
And not only that, on
a level playing field,
if we weren’t giving them the subsidies to the incumbents,
our technologies would beat them and soundly.
They simply couldn’t compete.

He called the movie’s claims that solar and wind don’t work
one of the movie’s many big lies
because even without a level playing field we already built more
solar and wind power in this country last year “than we did all
of the incumbents combined”.
Plus
you’ve got to fuel fossil or nuclear plants, not to mention
the toxic waste issues,
while once you build solar or wind “it’s free energy forever”.
Kennedy also pointed out the electric grid in the U.S. could be rebuilt to deliver solar and wind power as needed for less than has already been spent on breeder reactors that are no longer in use.
The filmmaker made no attempt to rebut any of Kennedy’s points about existing solar and wind technologies that already beat nukes, coal, and natural gas, instead going on about pie-in-the-sky modular reactors.

This all illustrates why

the Georgia Public Service Commission
needs to stop letting Georgia Power and Southern Company suck radioactive
profits at the public teat and make them

get on with replacing coal with solar
instead of

letting old coal plant sites sit unused for more than a decade.
Oh, and GA PSC needs to halt the Plant Vogtle nuke boondoggle,
which is even worse than

Southern Company’s Kemper Coal plant in Mississippi
as a huge transfer of wealth from the people of the state to a monopoly.

A monopoly that is supposed to be regulated as a public service.
By the Public Service Commission whose Commissioners

accept massive campaign contributions from employees and law firms
of the utilities they regulate.
It’s time for GA PSC to bat away the haze of coal smoke and the radioactive
taint that surrounds them
and go to bat against corruption and for the people of Georgia.

-jsq

What Georgia Power is afraid of: GaSU and Dr. Smith; and you

So what is Georgia Power afraid of

that made their CEO Paul Bowers double down on old-style baseload?
Competition, that’s what!
What could be more scary in the power-monopoly state of the

1973 Territorial Electric Service Act?

On one side, Georgia Power faces

GaSU and its 80 or 90 MW solar plant proposal.
Walter C. Jones wrote for OnlineAthens 24 September 2012,

Proposed solar company could stir up Georgia’s utility structure,

A proposal from a start-up business promises to lower electricity
rates by rebating profits to customers if given a chance to compete
as Georgia Power Co.’s “mirror image.”

To proceed with its long-range plan of developing 2 gigawatts of
solar power, the start-up, Georgia Solar Utilities Inc., wants to
start by building an 80-megawatt “solar farm” near
Milledgeville as soon as it gets a green light from the Georgia
Public Service Commission. GaSU filed its request last week, and as
of Monday, it’s still too fresh for public evaluation.

So radical is the proposal that spokespersons for Georgia Power and
the Georgia Solar Energy Association said they still were evaluating
it and could not comment.

Groups that normally advocate for customers also are staying quiet.

GaSU executives recognize such a big change won’t come easily.

Continue reading →

Southern Company’s three-legged nuclear regulatory-capture stool

The

failed EDF nuke project at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland
makes it clearer why Southern Company (SO) was the first company
to get a nuclear permit in 30 years:
it was the only one big enough and monopolistic enough to pull it off.
Even then it’s such a

bet-the-farm risk
that even

“great, big company”
SO only dared
to deploy its

“great big huge scale“ equipment
with the regulatory capture triple-whammy
of
a stealth tax on Georgia Power bills,
PSC approval of cost overruns,
and
an $8.33 billion federal loan guarantee:

a legislated
stealth tax in the form of

a rate hike on Georgia Power customers for
power they won’t get for years if ever.
If you’re a Georgia Power customer,
look on your bill for Nuclear Construct Cost Recovery Rider.
You’ll find it adds about 5% on top of your Current Service Subtotal.
Georgia is one of only a handful of states where such a
Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) charge is legal

thanks to our regulatory-captured legislature.
Doubling down on bad energy bets,
Southern Company is also

trying to use CWIP to build a coal plant in Mississippi.
A captive Public Service Commission that

rubber-stamps costs for Plant Vogtle.
In case there was any doubt as to the PSC’s role in legitimizing those new nukes,
the very next day Fitch reaffirmed Southern Company’s bond ratings.

Southern Company’s regulated utility subsidiaries derive predictable
cash flows from low-risk utility businesses, enjoy relatively
favorable regulatory framework in their service territories, and
exhibit limited commodity price risks due to the ability to recover
fuel and purchased power through separate cost trackers.

Translation: Georgia Power customers subsidize SO’s bonds
and SO shareholders’ stock dividends.
The PSC also approved
cost overruns being
passed on to Georgia Power customers,
and those nukes are already over

$400 or $900 million, depending on who you ask.
What do you expect when

4 out of 5 Public Service Commissioners
apparently took 70% of their campaign contributions from utilities
they regulate or their employees or their law firms,
and the fifth commissioner took about 20% from such sources?
Hm, there’s an election going on right now!
An

$8.33 billion federal loan guarantee.
Even that’s not good enough for SO and Georgia Power: SO is
asking for less down payment.

And what if even one of that three-legged regulatory capture stool’s legs
went away?