Southern Company doesn’t want to pay $17 to $52 million to get an $8.33 billion
federal loan guarantee.
That’s 0.2% to 0.62%.
Why should we guarantee SO’s bad bet for pennies down?
Let’s just call it off!
Ray Henry wrote for AP yesterday,
Talks continue over Ga. nuclear plant loans,
Three years after the U.S. government promised $8.3 billion in
lending for a nuclear plant in Georgia, Southern Co. and its
partners have not sealed a deal.
President Barack Obama’s administration recently agreed to a fourth
extension of the deadline for finalizing lending agreements between
Southern Co. subsidiary Georgia Power and the other owners of the
nuclear plant now under construction. Congress authorized the
funding in 2005 to revive a nuclear industry that at the time
expected growth.
Few utilities secured even a preliminary agreement, mostly because
power companies dropped plans to build nuclear plants. The Great
Recession trimmed the demand for energy, and plummeting natural gas
prices made it cheaper to build gas-fired plants. The slumping
economy also pushed interest rates to historic lows, reducing
borrowing costs and undercutting the need for subsidized lending.
All that and
ten nukes have been closed or cancelled in the past year.
Even France’s EDF
has exited nukes in the U.S. and has already built more U.S. solar and wind power
than SO’s new Plant Vogtle nukes would produce.
Southern Company now claims this federal loan guarantee isn’t necessary: Continue reading →
Mr. Quarterman,
