Tag Archives: Public Service Commission

Solar faster, cheaper, no cooling water, no leaks, no explosions

Way back in 2014 I calculated that half the right of way acreage of the Sabal Trail fracked methane pipeline could produce just as much electricity, cheaper, faster, taking no land, using no cooling water, risking no leaks or explosions. Solar is even cheaper now, doubling deployed capacity every two years, and even Duke, FPL, and Georgia Power are building solar farms everywhere. So why do utilities persist in building more pipelines?

Net generation, United State, all sectors, monthly, Chart
Net generation, United States, all sectors, monthly, U.S. EIA.

Every electric utility can read that chart from the U.S. Energy Information Agency, which shows wind (the middle orange line) and solar (the green line coming up from the bottom) adding up to almost all of “other renewables” (the top blue line), with nothing else growing like that. All the pipelines rammed through regulatorially captured agencies don’t come close Continue reading →

Koch astroturf vs. solar jobs for Georgians

More solar for Georgia must be a good thing if AFP is organizing astroturf against it. GA PSC decides Thursday. Like another speaker at GA PSC last month, I don’t think even Bubba McDonald’s proposal to double solar requirements on Georgia Power goes nearly far enough, but at least it’s a start, which is more than Georgia Power will do unless nudged by GA PSC.

Ray Henry wrote for AP yesterday, Critics’ numbers misleading in Georgia solar fight: Georgia panel will vote soon on power plan,

A political group founded by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch wants Georgia’s utility regulators to reject a plan requiring Southern Co. to buy more solar energy, but an Associated Press review finds it has used misleading figures to build its case.

The Georgia chapter of Americans For Prosperity, founded by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, wants Georgia’s utility regulators to reject a solar energy plan in Georgia. But an Associated Press review ahead of a vote on the issue finds that it has used misleading figures to build its case.

The Georgia chapter of Americans For Prosperity has said in mass e-mails that Continue reading →

Southern Company only building nukes because they’re not paying, we are –Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy said he’d be for nukes if they were safe or economical, but they are neither, while solar and wind are both. After calling the pro-nuke movie Pandora’s Promise a hoax, he addressed “safe” by pointing out the movie’s claimed former anti-nuke leaders were never leaders while major nuclear utility executives are indeed now anti-nuke leaders. (For example, I met former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman in DC where he was testifying against nukes.) Then Kennedy tore into Southern Company’s three-legged nuclear boondoggle and pointed out solar and wind are winning even against massive distortions in the economic playing field caused by public service commissions letting regulated utilities make the rest of us pay for their profits on uneconomic nukes.

Andrew Revkin posted on Youtube 19 June 2013, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Director of Pandora’s Promise Spar Over Nuclear Power,

The last nuclear power plant constructed in the world was in Finland. It cost about $11 billion a gigawatt. Now I’m involved with construction right now of one of the largest power plants that’s in north America which is in the Mojave Desert, and it’s a solar thermal plant, and it’s costing about $3 billion a gigawatt….

There’s no individual and there’s no merchant utility that will build a nuclear power plant, because they’re so expensive. You can’t make money on it. The only ones who will build them are regulated utilities like the Southern Company in Georgia… because they make money by spending money. They get reimbursed for their capital costs plus 12 or 15% per year. So they’ll construct it once they get approval from the public utility commission. Then they want to spend as much money on their capital costs because they’re not paying for it. You and I are paying for it.

I don’t think Bill Gates, or I saw Paul Allen was one of the funders of this film, that they’re going to spend their own money building one of these [nuclear] plants….

You could make energy by burning prime rib, but why would you take the most expensive way to do it.

And by last fall, the cost per gigawatt of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels was already under $3 billion per gigawatt so distributed solar PV makes just as much sense as massive desert thermal solar, and both make far more economic sense than nuclear. Plus costs of solar PV keep going down, pushing solar deployments up like compound interest, while nukes always take years to build and always cost more than budgeted. Southern Company is the king of nuke cost overruns, going 26 times overbudget per unit on Vogtle 1 and 2 and already 19 months late and about a billion dollarsoverbudget on Vogtle 3 and 4. Then there are the safety issues: a failed nuke can be Chernobyl or Fukushima and many nukes leak radioactive tritium into groundwater and vent radiation into the air, while a failed solar plant is a bunch of glass.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr wants a level playing field for solar and wind I got into the [solar] industry to show that there was an alternative and that the alternative was economically viable. And not only that, on a level playing field, if we weren’t giving them the subsidies to the incumbents, our technologies would beat them and soundly. They simply couldn’t compete.

He called the movie’s claims that solar and wind don’t work one of the movie’s many big lies because even without a level playing field we already built more solar and wind power in this country last year “than we did all of the incumbents combined”. Plus you’ve got to fuel fossil or nuclear plants, not to mention the toxic waste issues, while once you build solar or wind “it’s free energy forever”. Kennedy also pointed out the electric grid in the U.S. could be rebuilt to deliver solar and wind power as needed for less than has already been spent on breeder reactors that are no longer in use. The filmmaker made no attempt to rebut any of Kennedy’s points about existing solar and wind technologies that already beat nukes, coal, and natural gas, instead going on about pie-in-the-sky modular reactors.

This all illustrates why the Georgia Public Service Commission needs to stop letting Georgia Power and Southern Company suck radioactive profits at the public teat and make them get on with replacing coal with solar instead of letting old coal plant sites sit unused for more than a decade. Oh, and GA PSC needs to halt the Plant Vogtle nuke boondoggle, which is even worse than Southern Company’s Kemper Coal plant in Mississippi as a huge transfer of wealth from the people of the state to a monopoly.

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)

A monopoly that is supposed to be regulated as a public service. By the Public Service Commission whose Commissioners accept massive campaign contributions from employees and law firms of the utilities they regulate. It’s time for GA PSC to bat away the haze of coal smoke and the radioactive taint that surrounds them and go to bat against corruption and for the people of Georgia.

-jsq

Kemper Coal greatest transfer of wealth from customers to a monopoly –Brandon Presley, MS PSC

Too ambitious, technology untried, like Katrina and the BP oil spill: that’s Southern Company’s Kemper Coal plant, according to a Mississippi Public Service Commissioner.

Geoff Pender wrote for ClarionLedger.com yesterday, PSC member slams Miss. Power,

“This is the greatest transfer of wealth from customers to a monopoly in the history of the state of Mississippi,” [Brandon] Presley said. “Where are all these so-called conservatives on that?”

Maybe Mississippi, like Georgia, Continue reading →

HB 657, the Rural Georgia Economic Recovery and Solar Resource Act of 2014

The solar bill that’s been talked about for weeks has finally appeared in the Georgia legislature: HB 657. It’s better than I expected, because it’s about rural solar generation and distribution. However, there is a catch: a “community solar provider” must be certified by the Public Service Commission, instead of just setting up in business as in most states, and the PSC could certify only one state-wide monopoly; note the summary at the front says “an independent community solar provider” as in only one. But the body of the bill is more circumspect and says “any”. Perhaps if we get enough installations the benefits of solar will become obvious enough that the PSC will certify a lot of community solar providers, and we can get on with solar in Georgia, including house and business rooftop solar. Many thanks to Representatives Kidd of the 145th, Kirby of the 114th, Rogers of the 10th, Brockway of the 102nd, Fullerton of the 153rd, and others. And special credit to Robert E. Green, Shane Owl-Greason, and Ted Terry of Georgia Solar Utilities (GaSU) for shepherding this bill into the legislature.

Shane Owl-Greason, Ted Terry, Robert E. Green
Shane Owl-Greason, Ted Terry, Robert E. Green at the Dublin High School solar groundbreaking.

The bill requires the PSC to study changes in retail rates because of this bill. Too bad it doesn’t go the rest of the way to what North Carolina did, and require timely public posting of who buys and sells which types of energy at which prices, but at least it’s a start.

Maybe HB 657 will help get HB 503 passed for Renewable Portfolio Standards. However, HB 657 is cleaner than either HB 503 or SB 51 because it does not mess around with biomass or for that matter any other energy source: HB 657 is about solar energy and nothing else.

The main part of HB 657 is in Section 1, but first here’s how it shoehorns Continue reading →

Vermont protests against wind vs. nuclear

Compare 6 arrested of about 25 demonstrators against Green Mountain Power’s wind energy project on Lowell Mountain vs. 130 arrested of a thousand protesting in March against the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.

Also notice what they were protesting. The location on Lowell Mountain, as damaging the mountain top and being unsightly, plus:

“I feel like they [GMP] only went through the public process to a point, and the process is flawed,” said Young, a self-employed logger and farmer from Westfield. “Community members don’t have the resources to have a strong voice. It’s complex, expensive, and lawyers don’t want to do it.”

At Vermont Yankee, the protests were against radioactive leaks, nuclear waste, and this:

Yankee’s initial 40-year license expired Wednesday. The plant is still running, under a 20-year extension from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission—despite a vote by the state senate not to allow the plant to continue operating in Vermont.

A common theme is lack of democratic oversight, although even that seems greater in degree for Vermont Yankee. We are familiar with that issue in Georgia, where there’s an election going on for Public Service Commissioners and legislators.

Another common theme is that it’s complex and expensive, which is indeed an issue for big wind projects. Power companies like them as big as they can build them because that fits their corporate bureaucracy. They can instead be smaller and distributed. Nuclear power plants, on the other hand, are always big, bureaucratic, and expensive.

While I thoroughly sympathize with the Lowell Mountain protesters about the mountain top issues, I don’t see anything about them protesting the risk of a wind spill. Risks of nuclear radioactive contamination are very real, and are among the Vermont Yankee protesters’ main issues. Wind off the coast of Georgia would not have that problem.

-jsq

 

gapower to buy 50 MW solar by 2015

Previously I wrote PSC lining up to vote for solar and last week they went and did it.

Georgia Power will buy solar by 2015, By Associated Press – Athens Banner-Herald, 24 July 2011:

ATLANTA — The Public Service Commission has approved Georgia Power’s plans to buy up to 50 megawatts of solar power by 2015.

The utility plans to strike agreements with individual solar-power producers to meet the deadline. The providers would have to be able to connect to the transmission system for Georgia Power or its sister utilities in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi.

Continue reading →

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.

PSC lining up to vote for solar

Previously PSC Chair Lauren McDonald said he wanted Georgia Power to “come up with options in the next 30 days for expanding the tiny amount of electricity generated from solar power”. Yesterday, PSC Commissioner Chuck Eaton said “Solar is great for diversity, independence, research, and business,” and added that until recently he had discounted solar, but now he had seen it. And it turns out that Friday PSC Commissioner Tim Echols wrote an op-ed saying
It wasn’t until I entered the training room of Mage Solar in Dublin and saw 40 subcontractors in their solar academy that I got it. The growing solar industry is not just about funky collectors on a roof or left-leaning environmentalists who hate fossil fuel. It is about skilled jobs in manufacturing and construction, about economic development in Georgia, about consumers saving money on their power bill so they can spend it somewhere else, and about empowering people to essentially create their own power plant. This could eventually be big.
That’s three out of five commissioners. I’d call that a majority shaping up to do something in the PSC Energy Committee meeting of 16 July 2011. I couldn’t say what, exactly, since there nothing on the energy committee’s agenda about this. But something solar seems to be in the works.

-jsq

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 →