Tag Archives: Nuclear

Georgia Power wants taxpayers to take profit risk for new nukes

After already hiking rates to pay for Plant Vogtle units 3 and 4, Georgia Power now balks at taking any risk to its profit if costs go above the projected budget.

Kristi E. Swartz wrote in the AJC today, Georgia Power trashes regulatory staff’s financial proposal for Vogtle cost overruns:

Georgia Power officials told state regulators they never would have started to build a new multi-billion-dollar nuclear power plant if they knew the company might be on the hook for certain potential cost overruns.

The company, they said, would be building a natural gas plant instead.

Georgia Power, which is the largest stakeholder in a partnership building two new reactors at Plant Vogtle, is responsible for $6.1 billion of the $14 billion project. The Georgia Public Service Commission’s staff wants to cut into the utility’s allowed profit margin if the project runs more than $300 million over budget. Profits would similarly get a boost if the reactors come in under budget by the same amount.

The PSC deal sounds fair to me, or actually rather generous.

But not to the big-company socialists at Georgia Power:

At a PSC hearing Wednesday, company executives said the proposal could drive up financing costs of the project, potentially damage the ability to raise capital and eventually increase customer bills.

“As a member of the management team of the company, if this mechanism had been part of the original certification, we very likely would have not proceeded [with the project],” said Ann Daiss, Georgia Power’s comptroller.

Privatize the profits; socialize the risks! That’s the ticket!

They could spend less money building distributed solar farms and wind generators and get them built a lot faster with very little risk of cost overruns. Why isn’t Georgia Power interested in that?

“Even under the most adverse outcomes, the units remain highly profitable with very limited risk for investors,” [PSC staff member Tom] Newsome said. “We’ve been talking a lot about investors in this hearing and I think we need to be talking about [customers].”
Profits paid for by customer rate hikes and taxes from you, the taxpayer. You’d have a better deal if Georgia Power built solar and wind plants.

-jsq

PS: Owed to Mandy Hancock.

Georgia officials are getting it about solar

Chuck Eaton, Georgia Public Service Commissioner, moderating a panel of Georgia’s Policy Makers at Southern Solar Summit said
Solar is great for diversity, independence, research, and business.
He said that until recently he had discounted solar, but now he had seen it. Continue reading →

91% of voters support using solar power in NC —Ivan Urlaub of NCSEA

Like the previous speaker, Ivan Urlaub of the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association (NCSEA) pointed out there are downsides to too many incentives, such as too much dependence on them which means if they end, so can the industry. So how to generate demand?

They’ve done it in North Carolina:

91% of voters support using solar power to meet our growing needs for energy and electricity
Solar is hands down the most popular energy source across NC, across parties, ages, genders, etc. Coal and nuclear are the politically charged energy sources, and neither got a majority. Number 2 was offshore wind with 83% and number 3 was onshore wind with 82% support. Here’s the NCSEA press release. Here’s the survey.

How did they do this? Continue reading →

No land for solar in Georgia?

Nelson Hawk, after an excellent panel presentation at the Georgia Solar Summit, repeated the old canard that there’s not much land available for solar in the southeast. I couldn’t stand it, and blurted out “parking lots!” And airports, and road rights of way, and, let me think: rooftops! Or waste water treatment plants, like Valdosta just used, or barns on the north edges of fields, or the acreage Georgia Power is wasting on nuclear plants, or….


Gretchen Quarterman and Dan Corrie
Dan Corrie notes that Cobb EMC bought up 3600 acres in Ben Hill County for a coal plant. That acreage could generate quite a bit of solar power!

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From 4 to 40 solar companies in Georgia —James Marlow @ Solar Summit

James Marlow started the Georgia Solar Summit by saying in a few years we’ve gone from four to forty solar companies in Georgia, and we should:
“Stop talking about what we’re going to do in the future, and start talking about what we’re going to do in 100 days.”
He directly challenged Gov. Deal and the legislature.

“This is about goodness and light, and sound economics.”

The next speaker (didn’t get his name, sorry) ran through some statistics, including:

  • 93,502 U.S. solar workers: doubled since 2009
  • 26% growth
  • No other industry is growing like this.
A telling comparison:
  • 1GW nuclear power station takes 10 years to build.
  • In one month Germany installed 2GW of solar last June.
Germany, which is far north of Georgia. Georgia has far more sun.

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Neither wind nor solar power “need to be purchased by Halliburton”

Continuing to see what “the indigenous” think about solar power:
Today, a number of Native tribes, from the Lakota in the Dakotas to the Iroquois Confederacy in New York to the Anishinaabeg in Wisconsin, battle to preserve the environment for those who are yet to come. The next seven generations, the Lakota say, depend upon it.

“Traditionally, we’re told that as we live in this world, we have to be careful for the next seven generations,” says Loretta Cook. “I don’t want my grandkids to be glowing and say, ‘We have all these bad things happening to us because you didn’t say something about it.’

Part of this family and spiritual obligation to preserve

Continue reading →

Energy reliability: let’s do the study for Georgia

Which energy source is really more reliable? Nuclear, coal, or wind, water, and sun?

As Plant Vogtle and others have just demonstrated, nuclear power isn’t as reliable as we might have thought. Mark Z. Jacobson says we can generate reliable power from wind, water, and sunlight alone. Will that work in Georgia?

Elsevier’s policy of charging for peer-reviewed articles from scientific journals is controversial, and some people find $19.95 prohibitive to access Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi’s Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials from Energy Policy Volume 39, Issue 3, March 2011, Pages 1154-1169. Fortunately, the same authors wrote an earlier version for Scientific American, 26 October 2009, A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables: Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world’s energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. Here’s how

A new infrastructure must provide energy on demand at least as reliably as the existing infrastructure. WWS technologies generally suffer less downtime than traditional sources. The average U.S. coal plant is offline 12.5 percent of the year for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. Modern wind turbines have a down time of less than 2 percent on land and less than 5 percent at sea. Photovoltaic systems are also at less than 2 percent. Moreover, when an individual wind, solar or wave device is down, only a small fraction of production is affected; when a coal, nuclear or natural gas plant goes offline, a large chunk of generation is lost.
Continue reading →

Nuclear (Stewart Brand) vs. renewable energy (Mark Z. Jacobson) at TED

Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame is a long-time environmentalist who in recent years decided nuclear was necessary. (He also decided no-till was necessary, which was enough to convince me he’s gone barmy.) Here at TED he debates Mark Z. Jacobson, whose new study says we can power the world with wind, water, and sun. I think Jacobson should reconsider including building more hydroelectric dams, but his study does demonstrate that we don’t need nuclear or biomass. But watch it and see what you think:

Here is my critique of Brand’s arguments: Continue reading →

Solar and wind: All that is lacking is the political will

Mike Childs wrote in the Guardian on 27 March 2011, Our green energy potential is huge, but gets little support: The crisis at Fukushima calls into question our nuclear power policy
Nuclear power is a gamble we don’t need to take. Studies show that the UK can meet its energy needs and tackle climate change without resorting to nuclear power or burning fossil fuels – all that is lacking is the political will.
Studies like this one for Scotland and this one for the whole world.

And the U.K. is way north of Georgia. Georgia gets a lot more sunlight and has plenty of wind off the coast. All that is lacking here, too, is the political will.

If Atlanta won’t lead, why not Valdosta and Lowndes County?

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Current costs of major power sources

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, here are the current costs of coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind (onshore and offshore), solar (electrical and hot water), geothermal, biomass, and hydroelectric:

Here’s a four page explanation of that table.

Coal is not the cheapest: natural gas is. Onshore wind actually costs about the same as coal, and less than nuclear. Offshore wind is currently about 2.5 times more expensive.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) currently costs a bit more than twice as much as coal, and already less than offshore wind.

The table does not take into account the environmental costs of the various power sources, or obviously coal would fare far worse, and biomass would not be rated anywhere near as good as wind.

Remember, the cost of solar is falling rapidly, so solar will rapidly become more cost-effective compared to other energy sources.

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