According to Ted Terry,
We are the first PSC campaign in over a decade to go up on the
broadcast airwaves!
Here’s
the video:
About those rate hikes:
Georgia Power hikes prices for gas and nuclear, then complains about solar
and
We can charge you even if it’s cancelled! —CWIPped Georgia Power
Steve Oppenheimer is on the record as
wanting more energy efficiency
and renewable energy (including solar energy).
-jsq
An excellent article about the problems with Georgia Power’s
new nukes on the Savannah River gets at something you may not know:
they can charge you for them even if they’re cancelled!
Steve Willis wrote for the Georgia Sierran Oct./Nov./Dec. 2012 page 5,
Overruns, Uncertainty Plague Vogtle Expansion,
If Southern Company abandons this
project, the CWIP law not only allows
Southern Company to keep all of the
CWIP payments legally extorted from
customers, but allows them to keep
CWIP fees in place or even increase them
until all their costs and profits have been
fully recovered. Due to the run-away
cost overruns, the CWIP charge on your
monthly bill is already more than three
times what Southern Company confidently
claimed it would be at this time
when they presented their case to “your”
Georgia legislature in 2009.
And that
2009 legislature
rubberstamped CWIP so it appears on your Georgia Power bill as
Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery Rider.
Willis reminds us that the 2 nukes already at Plant Vogtle were projected
to be four nukes for $600 million and ended up being two for $9 billion.
Everyone has heard the saying “Fool me once, shame on you;
fool me twice, shame on me.” If the Vogtle expansion costs
balloon, as many analysts expect, it will cost
Back in February,
Georgia Power argued that a free market in solar power would cause
price increases.
Yet they already increased prices for natural gas and
for nuclear plants that won’t produce electricity for years, if ever,
and are already massively overbudget and behind schedule.
Why should we believe them about solar when it’s their archaic projects
they already
are deploying that already have increased customer prices?
In February,
Greg Roberts of Georgia Power argued,
Another reason is that the customers of Georgia Power, Georgia’s
EMC’s and Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia are paying for the
poles and wires to transmit power, and the back-up generation to
cover the electricity needs when the sun isn’t shining. These costs
will have to be recovered from other customers not getting the
privileged deal from the developer, raising everyone else’s rates.While there are already numerous federal and state tax and other
incentives for solar development in Georgia, it is still much more
costly than the service provided by utilities. But what if
third-party solar developers could get other electric customers in
Georgia to foot the bill? That would be the result of this
legislation.It’s like asking Sally’s Café to pay the electric bill of Joe’s
Cafe across the street, thus allowing Joe to undercut Sally’s
prices.
Georgia Power well knows they could take a percentage of any power
transmitted through their lines, so that wires and poles and
backup generation argument is ludicrous.
And as far as subsidies, how about this one,
Georgia Power, Get the Facts, Investing in Georgia’s Energy Future:
SPLOST VII’s $22 million for a new library and parks and rec
goes about 2/3 for the library and 1/3 for parks and rec,
and the latter doesn’t all go to parks and rec at Five Points,
according to a mysterious red-letter note that has sprung up
on the Lowndes County website.
The front page of
lowndescounty.com
has sprouted this undated and unsigned
clarification under the SPLOST VII heading:
Exhibit A
(Please note that the $22 million proposed by Lowndes County for the
Library and Parks & Recreation, represents a division of
approximately $14.5 million for the Library and approximately $7.5
million for Parks & Recreation. In addition, the $7.5 million
proposed for Parks & Recreation is not allocated for parks and
improvements at the 5-Points site. Parks & Recreation will use these
funds for improvements in other areas of the county.)
Exhibit A is
the list of projects and estimated costs
that includes this item:
- payment of bond debt for acquisition and construction of and
equipping a new library facility and parks and recreation facilities
$ 22,000,000
Can somebody explain why the new library and Parks and Rec were lumped together
in the first place?
At least the county is sort of trying to explain the difference now.
They didn’t include the pie chart with their clarification.
I made the pie chart; took about
David A. Staples
running for the Georgia Public Service Commission for District 5,
talked about the ethical conflicts of the incumbents who take
almost all of their campaign contributions from people associated
with the utilities they regulate.
Then he mentioned that the new nuclear reactors Georgia Power
is building for Southern Company at Plant Vogtle
have
another $3.5 billion in cost overruns coming.
This is after
the PSC incumbents just rubberstamped the Vogtle budget in August,
and on top of the
$900 million in cost overruns we already knew about.
That $900 million was already more than 6% of the originally-projected $14 billion
total cost.
If it’s now $3.5 + $0.9 = $4.4 billion, that’s more than 31% over
the original total.
Maybe we should vote in some PSC members and legislators who will stop this nonsense.
Here’s
the video:
Valdosta #3! Followed by Albany #4! In poorest cities in the country.
What can we do about that?
Michael B. Sauter, Alexander E.M. Hess and Samuel Weigley, 24/7 Wall St.,
wrote for NBC News 14 October 2012,
America’s richest and poorest cities,
3. Valdosta, Ga.
- Median household income: $32,446
- Population: 140,599 (87th lowest)
- Unemployment rate: 9.2 percent(140th highest)
- Percent households below poverty line: 27.6 percent (ninth highest)
From 2007 to 2011, the unemployment rate in Valdosta increased by
130 percent, from 4 percent of workers to 9.2 percent. The number of
employed workers declined by more than 6,000 during that time. Those
jobs remaining often pay a lower salary. Last year, nearly 17
percent of the work force was employed in the generally low-paying
retail industry, the sixth highest percentage of all metro areas. In
2007, just 11.3 percent of the labor force worked in retail.
Valdosta, however, has an improving and active housing market. Home
prices rose nearly 12 percent between 2007 and 2011. Despite these
positives, 14.4 percent of housing units were vacant last year,
higher than the national vacancy rate of 13.1 percent. Also, 15.3
percent of homes were worth less than $50,000 versus 8.8 percent
nationwide.
The study is actually for “U.S. metropolitan statistical areas, or MSAs”
and this population is not just for Valdosta, it’s for the
Valdosta MSA,
which includes Brooks, Echols, Lanier, and Lowndes Counties.
Look who’s next on the list:
If tiny Denmark, farther north than Edmonton, Alberta, has already deployed
200 MW of solar capacity, why can't Georgia Power do it?
We know why:
Southern Company's three-legged nuclear regulatory-capture stool
is too profitable for SO and Georgia Power.
Molly Cotter wrote for Inhabitant 15 October 2012,
Denmark Hits 200 Megawatt Solar Capacity Goal 8 Years Ahead of Schedule,
Lets face it — its rare we see a government goal reached on
time, let alone early. Not too long ago, the Danish Government
announced an ambitious goal to reach 200 megawatts of solar capacity
by 2020, and as of last week, they have already met it! The country
is currently installing an average of 36 megawatts of solar panels
each month. At this rate, their resulting capacity by 2020 will be
over five times the original goal. Denmark's power is currently
20% supplied by renewable sources, and the nation has set a goal of
sourcing 100% of its energy from renewable sources by 2050.
So Denmark has already deployed four times as much solar capacity
as GA PSC required of Georgia Power,
and almost as much solar capacity as Georgia Power has just asked GA PSC to approve.
While deploying more per month than Southern Company's largest solar farms anywhere.
Maybe it's time to
elect Georgia Public Service Commissioners to represent you.
-jsq
Actually, that’s not entirely fair.
They did change the order of a few items on
the agenda.
And their
facebook page
(but not their
website)
has the snazzy new logo they approved last time.
-jsq
Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority
Agenda
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 5:30 p.m.
Industrial Authority Conference Room
2110 N. Patterson Street
The Georgia Public Service Commission decides how much you pay for energy.
If you’re tired of Georgia Power’s
three-legged nuclear regulatory-capture stool
and
Georgia lagging far behind other states in solar and wind energy,
or you just want
PSC members who will represent you
and who do not
accept massive campaign contributions from the utilities they regulate
or their employees or lawyers
like the incumbents do;
the incumbents who can’t even be bothered to show up for debates
or to answer questionnaires.
Here are two GA PSC challengers who did answer a questionnaire:
Democrat Steve Oppenheimer
and
Libertarian David Staples.
Early voting has already started:
you can vote for them today.
While you’re at it, you can
vote for statehouse legislators who will let the sun shine on Georgia.
-jsq
What’s really behind the charter school amendment referendum?
Corporate greed.
Jeff Faux wrote for AlterNet 15 October 2012,
Education Profiteering: Wall Street’s Next Big Thing?
Wall Street’s involvement in the charter school movement is presented as an act of philanthropy, but it’s really about greed.
He reviews some of
the evidence that charter schools don’t improve education,
especially when forced on states.
Then he gets into why so much money is flowing into charter schools
anyway.
Education privatization would not, per se, create a net new stimulus
for the economy. But by diverting large existing flows of money from
the public to the private sector it would create new profit-making
ventures that could be capitalized and transformed into stocks,
derivatives and leveraged securities. The pot has been sweetened by
a 39 percent federal tax credit for financing charter school
construction that can double an investor’s return in seven years.
The prospect of new speculative opportunities could well recharge
the animal spirits upon which Wall Street depends.Some “liberal” privatization promoters claim that charter schools
should not be considered private. But that’s an argument the
management companies that run the schools only use when they are
asking for more government funding. At the same time they argue in
courts and to legislatures that as private enterprises they should
not be subject to government audits, labor laws and other
restrictions.These companies rent, buy, and sell buildings; make contracts for
consulting, accounting and legal services, food concessions, and
transportation; and pay their managers far more than public school
principals earn. In cases where city governments have given land to
charter schools, for profit real estate companies have ended up
owning the subsidized land and buildings. In states where charter
schools are required to be nonprofit, profit-making companies can
still set them up and then organize a board of neighborhood
residents who will give them the right to manage the school with
little or no interference.In 2008 Dennis Bakke, CEO of Imagine Schools, a private company that
managed 71 schools in eleven states, sent an email to the firm’s
senior staff. It reminded his managers not to give school boards the
“misconception” that they were “responsible for making decisions
about budget matters, school policies, hiring of the principal, and
dozens of other matters.” The memo suggested that the community
board members be required to sign undated letters of resignation.
“It is our school, our money, and our risk,” he wrote, “not theirs.”
Yet in Georgia it’s our tax money they want to use to fund those
“public” private charter schools.
That’s the “large existing flows of money” they want to divert
into their profiteering pockets.
No wonder ALEC is so big into charter schools!
And look who else:
