Tag Archives: FERC

Florida Power and Light selected Sabal Trail for pipeline through Georgia

A Florida company selected a Texas company
that can use eminent domain in Georgia
to take your land.
Does that seem right to you?
Florida PSC has to review this pipeline.
Where’s Georgia PSC on this?

FPL PR 26 July 2013,

FPL selects Sabal Trail Transmission and Florida Southeast Connection to build new natural gas pipeline system into Florida,



Florida Power & Light Company today announced that its evaluation of
proposals for additional natural gas transportation capacity
determined that the best, most economical solution for ensuring
Florida’s continued access to the clean, affordable, U.S.-produced
fuel necessary to meet the growing electricity needs of the state’s
residents and businesses is a combination of a natural gas pipeline
and interconnection hub to be built by Sabal Trail Transmission,
LLC, and a second natural gas pipeline to be built by Florida
Southeast Connection, LLC….

Both Sabal Trail and Florida Southeast Connection will be interstate
natural gas pipelines subject to Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission approval and oversight.

In conjunction with today’s public announcement, FPL filed a
petition for prudence review with the Florida Public Service
Commission (PSC). Subject to PSC approval, Continue reading →

Spectra never bothered to check pipeline for corrosion –Spectra employee

So

“the pipe will be monitored 24/7”?
That’s not Spectra’s actual practice, according to an employee
and according to a federal fine.

By fjgallagher for Natural Gas Watch 19 June 2013,

Spectra Energy Employee: We Never Bothered to Check Natural Gas Pipeline for Corrosion,



A Spectra Energy employee acknowledged to federal inspectors that
the company never conducted key tests for corrosion on a natural gas
pipeline that was already operating at excess capacity, according to
documents recently obtained by NaturalGasWatch.org.

There’s much more in the article, including this:

Additionally, according to another May 2, 2013 letter sent under
separate cover from (PHMSA) to Holeman, Spectra failed to install
equipment to monitor whether or not the natural gas pipeline in
question was being affected by corrosion and could not produce any
records indicating that the pipeline had, in fact, ever been tested
for corrosion or that the pipeline was even structurally sound.

So that’s what
“the pipe will be monitored 24/7” means.
Good to know.

See Item 2 in that

Final Order
with fines
from the
Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA)
to Spectra Energy CEO Gregory L. Ebel: Continue reading →

Spectra backtracks about pipeline incident

Spectra flip-flops on major safety events as well as on
whose houses are beautiful
and

whether Georgia cities can use gas
from its pipeline from

PCB-polluted Anniston, Alabama to Orlando, Florida.
And Spectra was fined recently for violating both federal safety requirements
and its own operating procedures, including for pipeline monitoring.
Oh, and its natural gas comes from fracking.

Remember Spectra rep Andrea Grover,

quoted by the VDT?
Well, she’s been quoted elsewhere, too.


Mike Benard wrote for
CSRHUB 5 April 2013,

Spectra Energy ‘Backtracks’ on Methane Incident:
First: “Nothing Released …. No Smoke …. No Incident”;
Then Admits: Methane & Hydrocarbons Released,

Spectra Energy Corporation (SE, NYSE) was forced to backtrack on
dismissive assertions it made about a nighttime incident at its huge
natural gas compressor station in Bedford County, PA, after
persistent neighbors and a reporter kept pressing the company and
state regulators for facts.

A natural gas compressor station, like the ones

Spectra says will be along its proposed AL-GA-FL pipeline,
maybe in Dougherty County, maybe in Lowndes County; we don’t know.

Now Spectra could say this was a different kind of compressor
because it’s a different kind of operation in Pennsylvania.
What kind?
Fracking: Continue reading →

VDT starts to catch up about pipeline



Spectra used

Dougherty County Commissioner Ewell Lyle’s question
in answer the Valdosta Daily Times about that natural gas pipeline
from Alabama to Florida.
And notice how they’re saying Tallapoosa County, Alabama now, and not
mentioning

PCB-polluted Anniston, Alabama as the source of the pipeline?
The VDT map conveniently clips Alabama completely out of the picture.
How about we clip Georgia out of the pipeline and install solar power instead?

Matthew Woody wrote on the front page of the VDT today,

Pipeline intersects area:
Sabal Trail project runs from Alabama to Florida,



Andrea Grover, Public Affairs Representative from Spectra Energy,
said that initially the pipe was going to be a closed system, but
Spectra Energy decided to turn the pipe into an “open access
pipe,” meaning that any area along the pipe could potentially
tap into the system to either receive gas from or supply gas to the
pipeline. Describing the pipeline as a highway, Grover said it will
have on-ramps and off-ramps. They provide the transportation of the
gas, and once the pipe is in service, communities are encouraged to
work with Sabal.

Dougherty County Commissioner Ewell Lyle

suggested letting locals tap it
less than a week ago.

Note that weasel word: “potentially”.
I could “potentially” tap into the two (2) pipelines that
cross my property, but decades they’ve been there and that’s never happened.

When asked about the benefits of the pipe, Grover stated, Continue reading →

Solar will overtake everything –FERC Chair Jon Wellinghof

“Everybody’s roof is out there,” for solar power,
so natural gas or oil pipelines are a waste of time.


Solar prices dropping exponentially drive solar deployment up like compound interest, eventually onto everybody’s rooftops,
where eventually means in about a decade,
after which we’ll be ramping down natural gas like we’re already ramping down coal.
It’s time for Georgia Power and Southern Company and all of Georgia’s EMCs
to get on with solar and stop wasting resources on dead ends,
especially that bad idea of fifty years ago, nuclear power.

Herman K. Trabish wrote for Green Tech Media yesterday,

FERC Chair Jon Wellinghoff: Solar ‘Is Going to Overtake Everything’:
One of the country’s top regulators explains why he is so bullish on solar.

“Solar is growing so fast it is going to overtake
everything,” Wellinghoff told GTM last week in a sideline
conversation at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas.

If a single drop of water on the pitcher’s mound at Dodger Stadium
is doubled every minute, Wellinghoff said, a person chained to the
highest seat would be in danger of drowning in an hour.

“That’s what is happening in solar. It could double every two
years,” he said.

Indeed, as GTM Research’s MJ Shiao recently pointed out, in the next
2 1/2 years the U.S. will Continue reading →

The cloudy day doesn’t last for an entire month –John S. Quarterman @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

The disruptive challenge electric utilities face
is like

1: Solar power
telephone companies faced years ago, as Edison Electric Institute recently pointed out.
Circuit switching 20 years ago is like distributed solar power and
the smart grid it needs now;
this is what I described
at

the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.

Hi, I’m John Quarterman, I’m from Lowndes County, down near the Florida line.
These videos I’ve been taking are with Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange
and you’ll find them on YouTube later.


Two things

Now I’d like to commend Georgia Power for helping fund our Industrial Authority
down in Lowndes County to do a strategic plan.
And in the focus groups they did with that, they discovered there’s
at least

two things everybody wants: business, education, health care, the
people in general: Continue reading →

Ask Georgia Power to conserve our water –Garry Gentry for WWALS @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

Garry Gentry read the


WWALS Watershed Coalition letter
at

the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.

The recent rains have swollen our blackwater rivers, Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, and Little, under our longleaf pines and Spanish-moss-covered oaks, and filled up the tea-colored tannin waters in our frog-singing pocosin cypress swamps here in central South Georgia. But that was only a dent in our protracted drought that ranges from mild to extreme, with projections not much better….



There is no need to use our Floridan Aquifer water to build more
baseload power plants while Georgia lags behind Michigan,
Massachusetts, and even tiny New Jersey and Maryland in solar power.

WWALS calls on the PSC to ask Georgia Power to conserve our water
and to bring jobs to south Georgia through solar power and wind off
the Georgia coast.

You can read

the complete letter.
Here’s

the video:



Ask Georgia Power to conserve our water –Garry Gentry for WWALS

Georgia Power proposed closing of coal plants,

Administrative Session, GA Public Service Commission (GA PSC),

Doug Everrett (1: south Georgia), Tim Echols (2: east Georgia), Chairman Chuck Eaton (3: metro Atlanta), Stan Wise (5 north Georgia), Bubba McDonald (4: west Georgia),

Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),

244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta, GA, 30334-9052, 18 June 2013.

-jsq

Power source growth rates like compound interest

What if instead of
projecting percentages, we project gigawatts from
FERC’s December 2012 Installed Operating Generating Capacity table?
Solar and wind still win in less than a decade.


FERC 2012 power source gigawatts and growth rates projected 20 years

Ignore the fastest-growing curve for a moment; I added that.
All the other curves start with the December 2012 gigawatts
for each power source in the FERC table, and an annual compound
growth rate computed by comparing that installed operating capacity
to the capacity added in 2012 for that power source.
That compound annual growth rate for solar is 60.9% and for wind is 22.8%.
Nothing else comes close.

Solar passes coal in about 8 years, wind in about 9, and natural gas in
about

Continue reading →

Solar energy growth like compound interest

Some nuclear backers only want to look at the
next table in that FERC report,

Office of Energy Projects
Energy Infrastructure Update
For December 2012,
which shows solar energy as 0.34% of total U.S. energy production,
and then they stop thinking.
But what about

that 30% increase in solar power deployed
between 2011 and 2012?
Think of it like compound interest.

Total Installed Operating Generating Capacity
Installed Capacity (GW) % of Total Capacity % Growth 2011-2012
Coal 337.71 29.17% 1.3%
Natural Gas 491.82 42.48% 1.8%
Nuclear 107.01 9.24% 0.1%
Oil 41.32 3.57% 0.1%
Water 98.12 8.47% 0.1%
Wind 57.53 4.97% 22.8%
Biomass 15.00 1.30% 3.7%
Geothermal Steam 3.70 0.32% 4.2%
Solar 3.90 0.34% 60.9%
Waste Heat 0.69 0.06% 0.4%
Other 1.04 0.09% 0.0%
Total 1,157.86 100.00% 23.3%

Source: Data derived from Ventyx Global LLC, Velocity Suite.

Growth rates computed by jsq for LAKE www.l-a-k-e.org 24 January 2013.

Let’s look what happens if we assume 30% growth in solar power deployed per year:


Solar power growth rates like compound interest

At 30% annual growth,
we’re up to solar as 50% of all generation
within

Continue reading →

New U.S. energy in 2012 —FERC


What new energy sources are being deployed the fastest in the U.S.?
According to FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,
it’s not what you may think.
The big winners are coal, wind, and solar.

According to the report

Office of Energy Projects
Energy Infrastructure Update
For December 2012,
Coal, while accounting for only 17% of new capacity in 2012,
unfortunately increased by 133% over new capacity installed in 2011.
Natural gas did account for the second most new installed capacity in 2012,
33%, but the amount in megawatts installed actually decreased by 20%
from 2011.

The most new capacity installed in 2012?
Wind, at 40%, with a 56% increase over new installations in 2011.
That’s right, wind beat natural gas 40% to 33% in total new capacity in 2012,
and whomped gas in increase in new capacity in 2011, by 56% to -20%.

While solar only accounted for 5.59% of new capacity in 2012,
that was an increase of 30% over new capacity in 2011,
which is way more than gas and after only coal and wind.

New Generation In-Service (New Build and Expansion)
December 2012 January – December 2012 Cumulative January – December 2011 Cumulative Percent of Total New 2012 Percent Increase 2011- 2012
Primary Fuel Type No. of Units Installed Capacity (MW) No. of Units Installed Capacity (MW) No. of Units Installed Capacity (MW)
Coal 4 1,434 8 4,510 15 1,932 17.1% 133%
Natural Gas 6 2,306 94 8,746 108 11,020 33.1% -20.6%
Nuclear 0 0 1 125 0 0 0.474% -%
Oil 0 0 19 49 66 136 0.186% -64%
Water 2 4 13 99 41 94 0.375% 5.32%
Wind 45 3,095 164 10,689 146 6,844 40.5% 56.2%
Biomass 5 91 100 543 131 446 2.06% 21.7%
Geo- thermal Steam 2 9 13 149 9 56 0.565% 166%
Solar 16 77 240 1,476 354 1,131 5.59% 30.5%
Waste Heat 0 0 1 3 2 136 0.0114% -97.8%
Other 2 0 5 0 11 0 0% -%
Total 82 7,016 658 26,387 883 21,795 100% 21.1%

Source: Data derived from Ventyx Global LLC, Velocity Suite.

Last two columns added by jsq for LAKE www.l-a-k-e.org 24 January 2013.

Biomass unfortunately accounted for

Continue reading →