Here’s
Southern Company’s own video
of the
22 May 2013 shareholders meeting.
More detail will follow on the record number of questions,
and CEO Tom Fanning’s answers, in addition to this one already posted.
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Tag Archives: Wind
Profits also link Vogtle nukes and Kemper coal
Southern Company gets substantial profits from utility customers paying in advance
for “clean coal” in Kemper County, MS and for new nukes at Plant Vogtle
on the Savannah River in Georgia.
As long as SO can keep raking in those profits, it has incentive
not to get on with distributed solar power.
Kristi E. Swartz wrote for the AJC 27 July 2011,
Southern Co.’s profits up on nuke finance fees,
A fee added to Georgia Power bills to help finance a planned nuclear
plant expansion also helped parent Southern Co. post an 18 percent
profit gain in the second quarter.The $3.73 monthly fee offsets financing costs for two proposed
nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle.Atlanta-based Southern cited it as one of the factors lifting net
income to $603.3 million, or 71 cents a share, in the April-June
quarter compared with $510.2 million, or 62 cents a share a year
earlier. Profits were also helped by a hot early summer, the company
said.
Back then SO CEO Tom Fanning said,
“The whole issue is to preserve schedule and costs,” Fanning said.
Kemper Coal: SO’s bitter pill @ SO 2013-05-22
“Corporate responsiblity,” answered Southern Company CEO Thomas A. Fanning
to questions about Kemper Coal from Linda St. Martin of Mississippians
For Affordable Energy.
I don’t think that word means what he thinks it means.
Ray Henry wrote for AP yesterday,
Southern Co. CEO defends Miss. power project,
Dear SO: Time to move beyond coal –Sierra Club
You can to talk to Southern Company
even if you can’t come to SO’s
annual stockholder meeting 22 May at Callaway Gardens.
Sierra Club helps you to ask SO CEO Thomas A. Fanning questions; maybe
about SO’s nuclear financial and safety performance,
or
why SO is already losing on its “clean coal” bet in Mississippi,
or
when SO might get serious about distributed solar power,
or
when SO will help Georgia join the Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy Consortium,
or….
So many possible questions, and you don’t even have to go to ask them!
Sierra Club message to Southern Company,
Tell Southern Company to Move Beyond Coal,
On May 22, Southern Company will host its annual shareholder meeting
in Georgia, giving us a great opportunity to push them forward on
clean energy.
Southern Company has taken steps to grow clean energy in the
Southeast — Alabama Power and Georgia Power both invested in
wind energy and Georgia power increased solar energy investments
— but they can do a lot more.Southern Company still provides some of the dirtiest, most
unreliable, dangerous, and expensive power in the country. And its
subsidiaries continue to place “Big Bets” on dirty coal electricity
that poisons the health of our communities’ water, air, and
families. Georgia is even home to the biggest emitter of carbon
pollution in the nation, Scherer Plant in Juliette.Send a message to Southern Company’s CEO Tom Fanning to thanking him
for clean energy investments, and demand that Southern Company clean
up its act and invest in job creating clean energy.
Follow the link to send a message.
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No San Onofre nuke startup decision until June at least –NRC Chair
Two more victories for anti-nuke activists:
San Onofre restart decision pushed back at least until June,
and webcasts of California Public Utilities Commission hearings going on right now.
Abby Sewell reported for the L.A. Times yesterday,
Decision on San Onofre pushed back to June at the earliest,
The plant’s operator Southern California Edison had hoped at one
point to have one of the plant’s two units operating by summer, but
NRC Chairwoman Allison Macfarlane made it clear that will not
happen.Macfarlane told reporters Tuesday after a speech, “You know, the
process is very complicated now. Almost every day it gets a little
more complicated…. Right now I can tell you a decision on restart
won’t happen until the end of June, certainly after the middle of
June.“It may get pushed back later,” she said. “I don’t know.”
She didn’t say much about the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB)
decision to require NRC public hearings before any decision on
restarting San Onofre,
but she did say this:
NRC tries to ignore hearing requirement for San Onofre nuke restart
Maybe the ASLB was referring to some other NRC that should hold public
hearings?
The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) agreed with Friends
of the Earth (FOE) when it ruled that
restarting either San Onofre unit requires a full public hearing
like a trial, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) interprets
that as having nothing to do with its own staff decision process.
This is after the city of Los Angeles (and numerous other
southern California cities and the San Diego Unified School District)
said it didn’t want any
decision about restarting any San Onofre reactor/ without a full,
transparent, public decision process.
The L.A. Times says all this is creating “confusion”.
Just last week I heard Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers say confusion
was bad for business.
Maybe it will be bad not just for Southern California Edison and its
San Onofre nukes, but also for Georgia Power and Southern Company’s
19-month-late and billion-over-budget nuclear boondoggle at Plant Vogtle.
Abby Sewell wrote for the L.A. Times yesterday 7:24 PM,
San Onofre ruling creates confusion,
Wind power parts made in Valdosta: ADB Hoist Rings
Maybe no solar manufacturers around here yet, but there’s one for
wind power.
According to
Windpower Conference & Exhibition May 5-8 2013 Chicago, IL,
one of the exhibitors is
ADB Hoist Rings Mfg. of Valdosta, GA.
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The Super Bowl of disruptive distributed energy: Georgia Power and Southern Company are losing
It’s literally game-changing time with solar power at the electric utilities,
while Georgia Power and Southern Company are sticking with big baseload
nuclear, “clean coal”, and natural gas.
They cannot win if they don’t even try.
Steven Schultz wrote for Physorg 6 May 2013,
Growth of ‘distributed’ electricity generation could transform
utility systems,
(Phys.org) —The U.S. electric utility industry faces a
critical juncture as new technology and declining prices allow a
more “distributed” system of small-scale generators, renewable
energy installations and energy-efficiency strategies, according to
a group of high-level energy industry executives and regulators who
met at Princeton University recently.“We have a monumental challenge,” said Jon Wellinghoff, chairman of
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who participated in the
all-day meeting Friday, April 26. Citing commentary by an analyst
who warned of a potential “train wreck” in the industry, Wellinghoff
outlined converging tends in which technological advances are
allowing consumers and companies to take matters of reliability,
security and efficiency into their own hands, while utility
companies are under pressure to maintain and upgrade a national
electricity system that is broadly accessible.“Everybody saw the Super Bowl,” Wellinghoff said, referring to the
half-hour blackout that disrupted the 2013 football championship.
He didn’t mention that after blacking out the Super Bowl Continue reading
Your jaw will drop with astonishment at how fast solar power will beat every other energy source –a stock trader
A stock trader looked for causes of solar stock price rises
and considered the effects of solar PV price drops,
and realized solar power is going to
beat every other energy source so fast that it
“will make your jaw drop with astonishment.”
Michael Sankowski wrote for Business Insider 3 May 2013,
Solar Is Going To Change The World Much Faster Than Anyone Expects,
6% year is a fantastic rate of decreases, but 20% is simply
astonishing. 20% is an impressive number, but putting it into
context will make your jaw drop with astonishment.My calculations show that if solar maintains 5 more years at current
23% rates per year price drops, solar power will be cheaper than
using existing coal plants. That’s right — it will be cheaper
to build new solar plants than to use existing coal plants. It
sounds absolutely crazy.
First he discovers the effects of no fuel for solar in Continue reading
Gulf 3 years ago; Caspian 5 years ago: BP oil well blowouts
Two years before
BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig poisoned the Gulf of Mexico
(Saturday was the third anniversary),
apparently BP had a very similar disaster in the Caspian Sea
and covered it up.
Is this a company or this the
13 spills in 30 days
industry we want piping tar sands crude across
America to the Gulf
for all of 35 permanent jobs and CO2 emissions like 51 coal plants?
There’s a cleaner, cheaper, and more energy-independent way:
solar
and
wind power can power the U.S. and the world.
Greg Palast wrote for EcoWatch 19 April 2013,
BP Covered Up Blow-out Two Years Prior to Deadly Deepwater Horizon Spill,
Two years before the Deepwater Horizon blow-out in the Gulf of
Mexico, another BP off-shore rig suffered a nearly identical
blow-out, but BP concealed the first one from the U.S. regulators
and Congress.This week, EcoWatch.org located an eyewitness with devastating new
information about the Caspian Sea oil-rig blow-out which BP had
concealed from government and the industry.The witness, whose story is backed up by rig workers who were
evacuated from BP’s Caspian platform, said that had BP revealed the
full story as required by industry practice, the eleven Gulf of
Mexico workers “could have had a chance” of survival.
But BP’s insistence on using methods proven faulty sealed their
fate.One cause of the blow-outs was the same in both cases: the use of a
money-saving technique—plugging holes with
“quick-dry” cement.By hiding the disastrous failure of its penny-pinching cement
process in 2008, BP was able to continue to use the dangerous
methods in the Gulf of Mexico—causing the worst oil spill in
U.S. history. April 20 marks the second anniversary of the Gulf oil
disaster.
There’s more in
the article, such as this: