Tag Archives: Plant Vogtle

Southern Company sells off gas assets second time this year 2018-11-07

For the second time this year, Southern Company sells off gas-fired assets.
Could it be to service debt for those way-late and over-budget Plant Vogtle nukes?

Southern Company, PR, 7 November 2018,

Southern Power Reaches Agreement to Sell the Mankato Energy Center,


Southern Power, a leading U.S. wholesale energy provider and
subsidiary of Southern Company, today announced that it has entered
an agreement to sell the Mankato Energy Center to Xcel Energy for
$650 million.

Mankato, a natural gas combined-cycle generation facility, will have
a maximum capacity of approximately 760 megawatts upon completion of
an ongoing expansion project. The completion of the sale, subject to
regulatory approval and other closing conditions, is expected to be
mid-2019.

“The Mankato Energy Center is a valuable part of the local community
and the regional energy infrastructure,” said Southern Power
President and CEO Mark Lantrip. “This transaction is a great
opportunity to deliver value for the benefit of Southern Company
shareholders.”

Proceeds from this transaction will be used to strengthen the
balance sheet of Southern Company and position Southern Power to
continue providing clean, safe, reliable and affordable wholesale
energy to its customers across the U.S, including the expansion of
one of the nation’s largest carbon-free renewable energy portfolios.

What does “strengthen the balance sheet” mean? Continue reading →

Big Bets keep getting worse for Southern Company

OSHA certified a “continuing pattern of retaliatory treatment”
at Kemper “clean” Coal after an employee
alerted Southern Company of alleged fraud: SO fired him, refused to hire him back and now he’s suing.
Plant “new nukes” Vogtle also had
impossible projections from the start and is even later and more overbudget,
while anybody from GA-PSC to Georgia EMCs to the Florida PSC
or even PowerSouth in Alabama could bring it down.
Somebody put Plant Vogtle out of its misery so we can get on with solar power
in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and everywhere else.


Plant Vogtle reactors 3 and 4

Two new cooling towers and construction cranes mark the work sites for nuclear reactors 3 and 4 at Plant Vogtle in east Georgia. The project is currently $3.6 billion over budget and almost four years behind the original schedule. JOHNNY EDWARDS / JREDWARDS@AJC.COM, in
Plant Vogtle: Georgia’s nuclear ‘renaissance’ now a financial quagmire by Russell Grantham and Johnny Edwards, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 19 May 2017.

Kemper “clean” Coal

Doyle LLP, PRNewswire, 8 August 2017,

Whistleblower in Kemper Project Sues Southern Company and CEO:
OSHA ruled former company engineer faced “continuing pattern of
retaliatory treatment” Continue reading →

Video: Solar panels, heck yeah! –Tom Fanning, CEO, at SO stockholder meeting 2017-05-24

Tom Fanning, our genial CEO host,
said some things I’ve never heard him say before like
Southern Company is
“pivoting towards wind”
and SO’s board soon has to decide whether to go forward with Plant Vogtle
“or not” probably by August.
Fanning gets the

first and

last word in this blog post,
plus a complete transcript of what
I asked and
Tom Fanning’s response,
along with summaries of the other questions and answers.


Well see how it develops --Tom Fanning


Please hear me!
I think renewables are exceedingly important in the future.

— Tom Fanning, CEO, Southern Company

In SO’s own

meeting video
of the

25 May 2017 Stockholder Meeting,
you can see
much praise about solar power and wind and R&D and a smart grid,
along with stockholders wondering: Continue reading →

Georgia Power buys 99MW in two Georgia solar projects

Decatur County scores two big solar projects.
When will Lowndes County get a move on in solar?
How about some projects like this at your empty industrial parks,
Valdosta-Lowndes Development Authority?
Now that even Southern Company CEO Tom Fanning is bragging about renewable
energy, maybe the solar sun is shining enough for other local governments
to see it.

Southern Company PR, PRnewsWire, 20 February 2015,

Southern Company subsidiary acquires two Georgia solar projects totaling 99 megawatts,



Southern Company subsidiary Southern Power today announced the
acquisition of two photovoltaic (PV) solar projects totaling 99
megawatts (MW) in Georgia — the 80-MW

Decatur Parkway Solar
Project and the 19-MW

Decatur County Solar Project — from
Tradewind Energy, Inc.

The projects were proposed by Continue reading →

Georgia Power can’t get a schedule from its own contractors for Vogtle nuclear project

After two years of no integrated project schedule (IPS),
Georgia Power tried to get the
the elected Public Service Commissioners to
tell it how to enforce a contract for Plant Vogtle that Georgia Power
brought to them.
This video clip ends with formerly staunch pro-nuclear Commissioner
H. Doug Everett saying any company that did that probably would be imprudent.
And Everett also said:

We haven’t seen any results.


Georgia Power’s representative, I think Rob Trokey, said:

We have agreed haven’t we that
the company does not manage this project.
They oversee it,
they may report to this commission the status of it,
but it does not manage this project.

Answer from the Commission:

It doesn’t.

So who does?
According to Georgia Power: Continue reading →

Solar or wind investment will produce more energy than oil or natural gas

We already knew solar and wind are better investments than nuclear or natural gas,
and now we find they’re already better than oil.

In Impact Lab 18 September 2014,

$100B invested in wind or solar will produce more energy than oil,



Kepler Chevreux, a French investment bank, has produced a
fascinating analysis that has dramatic implications for the global
oil industry. The investment bank estimates that $100 billion
invested in either wind energy or solar energy — and deployed
as energy for light and commercial vehicles — will produce
significantly more energy than that same $100 billion invested in
oil.

The implications, needless to say, are dramatic. It would signal the
end of Big Oil, and the demise of an industry that has dominated the
global economy and geo-politics, for the last few decades. And the
need for it to reshape its business model around renewables, as we
discuss here.

“If we are right, the implications would be momentous,”
writes Kepler Chevreux analyst Mark Lewis.

“It would mean Continue reading →

Energy Policy Act of 2005 considered harmful



The same Energy Policy Act of 2005 that

subsidized dirty oil and fracked methane including LNG exports
also funded

that oxymoron “clean” coal such as Southern Company’s Plant Ratcliffe
in Mississippi,

ethanol production lining the pockets of Monsanto, and

the $8.3 billion loan guarantee
to Georgia Power for the new nukes at Plant Vogtle.



2005 was a very long time ago in solar PV years:

prices are halved, and installed solar power production is up more
than ten times and growing exponentially like compound interest.
We need to stop throwing money at dirty, water-sucking,
centralized baseload 20th century non-solutions and get on with
clean 21st century distributed solar and wind power
for jobs, for energy independence, and for clean air and water,
not to mention less climate change.

-jsq

NRC nuke waste plan failed federal appeal



Why the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is

trying to get the public’s confidence in nuclear waste management:
NRC lost an appeal in 2012.
Southern Company’s new nukes at Plant Vogtle scraped by before
this happened, but there’s still no place for nuke waste
even from the existing Vogtle 1 and 2 reactors to go.
NRC has a revised Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) scheduled to be finished October 2014.

Here’s U.S. DC Circuit Court of Appeals decision
No. 11-1045 NY v. NRC 8 June 2012,

on the Court’s website
and

on NIRS’ website.

David Erickson and Mark Anstoetter wrote for Lexology 17 August 2012,

NRC suspends issuance of nuclear power plant licenses,



In response to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to vacate
its rule regarding long-term storage of nuclear waste, New York v.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, No. 11-1045 (D.C. Cir. 6/8/12), the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has agreed to suspend Continue reading →

The fragility of centralized energy systems

All

thermal power generation requires water for cooling,
with nukes so vulnerable no private insurer will cover them anyway
and failing frequently in recent heat waves.
“Natural” gas is no better than coal or oil for water use;
maybe worse because all those pipelines vulnerable to backhoes
or corrosion or attack.
Even hydro is vulnerable to lack of rainfall.
Carbon sequestration doesn’t get good marks, while
conservation and efficiency get rave reviews from
a study of insurance perspectives on power generation.
What’s the one power source this article about insurance risks does not say
is fragile in the face of climate change?
Hint: look up.


Limiting Liability in the Greenhouse:
Insurance Risk-Management
Strategies in the Context of
Global Climate Change,
by
Christina Ross, Evan Mills, and Sean B. Hecht,
Stanford Environmental Law Journal and the Stanford Journal of International Law,
Symposium: on Climate Change Risk, Vol. 26A/43A:251, 2007.



Supply-side energy choices that may be made to reduce the
carbon-intensity of energy services have their own distinctive
liability characteristics. For example, switching to lower-carbon
electricity generation technology based on thermal power plant
technology (e.g., by substituting natural gas for coal) results in
systems that are still heavily dependent on water resources for
cooling. The Electric Power Research Institute has documented
considerable risks to traditionally cooled power generation systems
as a result of climate
change-induced droughts.242 Similarly, “zero-emissions” hydroelectric
generating systems are also sensitive to rainfall patterns.

242
Denis Albrecht,

Electric Power Research Institute, Presentation:
Climate Impact on Water Availability for Electricity Generation
(April 11, 2006) (presentation slides associated with the Electric
Power Research Institute).

Centralization considered harmful

Continue reading →

Southern Company downgraded to sell over Kemper coal and Vogtle nuclear



Time to break out of the utility death spiral by breaking
away from cost overruns at Kemper “clean” Coal
and the Plant Vogtle nuclear boondoggle
and getting on with real renewable solar and wind power.

UBS wrote 5 May 2014,

Southern Company: Kemper Tantrums; Reducing to Sell,

Reducing to Sell on continued delays for the Kemper IGCC project

With further delays and increased costs for the Kemper IGCC project
resulting in yet another $380M of writedowns (further slippage
costing $25M/month) and now the likely loss of $120M-$150M of bonus
depreciation as well, we view the current premium P/E multiple as
untenable.


While the Vogtle nuclear project appears to be on track,
the presence of two major risky projects, Continue reading →