{"id":258,"date":"2012-12-16T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-12-16T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/12\/renewables-are-winning-nukes-are-dead-and-coal-is-crashing.html"},"modified":"2012-12-16T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-12-16T13:00:00","slug":"renewables-are-winning-nukes-are-dead-and-coal-is-crashing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/12\/renewables-are-winning-nukes-are-dead-and-coal-is-crashing.html","title":{"rendered":"Renewables are Winning, Nukes are Dead, and Coal is Crashing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\n<\/a>\nSomebody is willing to read the sunshine writing:\n\nRenewables are Winning, Nukes are Dead and Coal is Crashing<\/a>, as\nKathleen Rogers and Danny Kennedy wrote for EcoWatch 14 Dec 2012.\n<\/p>\n

\nAs I wrote\n\nback in April when formerly coal-plotting Cobb EMC went solar:<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\nCoal is dead. Nuclear is going down.\nSolar will eat the lunch of utilities that don’t start generating it.\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nCan Georgia Power and Southern Company (SO) read that handwriting on the wall?\n\n<\/a>\nThey can’t fight Moore’s Law, which has steadily brought the cost\nof solar photovoltaic (PV) energy down for thirty years now, and\nshows no signs of stopping.\nThis is the same Moore’s Law that has put a computer in your pocket\nmore powerful than a computer\nthat cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1982\nand was used by an entire company.\n\nSolar PV costs dropped 50% last year.<\/a>\nAlready \nall<\/em> the new U.S. electric capacity installed this September\nwas solar and wind.<\/a>\nAs this trend continues, solar will become so much more cost-effective\nthan any fossil or nuclear fuel power that nobody will be able to ignore it.\n<\/p>\n

\nRogers and Kennedy explained this phenomenon:\n<\/p>\n

\nThe seismic shift in how we all use cell phones and mobile technology to access the internet almost snuck up on the incumbent technologies and the monopolies that made money selling us landline telephones and a crappy service. Now, we\u2019re all using apps on smartphones all of the time. So too, the shift to a scaled, solar-powered future built around the modular technology at the heart of solar power\u2014the photovoltaic solar cell\u2014will come as a surprise to many. We call it the solar ascent, and it is happening every day in a million ways.\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nWill SO and Georgia Power continue to prop up\n\nthat 1973 legal wall<\/a>\n\n<\/a>\nthat\n\ninhibits solar financing in Georgia?<\/a>\nCompanies and even economic development authorities are\n\nstarting to find ways around it,<\/a>\nand of course there’s\n\nGeorgia Solar Utilities (GaSU)<\/a> trying to\n\nwedge into the law as a utility.<\/a>\nAfter Hurricane Sandy,\n\nrooftop solar for grid outage independence<\/a>\nhas suddenly hit the big time\n(Austin Energy caught onto that back in 2003<\/a>).\nThe\n\nU.S. military got solar and renewable energy<\/a>\nback in Afghanistan and are now doing it bigtime everywhere.\n<\/p>\n

\nSO and Georgia Power can try to ignore\n\n\nGermany<\/a>\nand \nDenmark<\/a>\nfar to the north forging ahead with solar while\nGeorgia Power\n\nraises rates in Georgia to fund natural gas plants<\/a>\nand for\n\n<\/a>\n\nSouthern Company’s three-legged nuclear regulatory-capture stool<\/a>\nboondoogle that will\n\nsuck up more water from the Savannah River than the city of Savannah.<\/a>\nWhile Georgia Power\n\ncomplains about solar<\/a>,\neven though solar uses no water, needs no fuel, and emits no pollutants,\nplus solar gets installed on time and on budget.\n<\/p>\n

\nWhat’s going to fry SO and Georgia Power’s dirty lunch like\na bug under a sunshine magnifying glass is cost.\n\n<\/a>\n\nSolar already crossed nuclear at least two years ago.<\/a>\nGermany admitted this spring that\n\nsolar beats coal<\/a>, and even Southern Company has given up on\nnew coal plants\n(other than its\n\nKemper Coal CWIP stealth-tax rate-hike boondoggle in Mississippi<\/a>)\nand is\n\nclosing old ones.<\/a>\nAnd yes, \nsolar already beats natural gas in cost<\/a>,\nwhen you figure in construction costs\nand the most elementary fact:\nsolar needs no pipelines because it needs no fuel.\n<\/p>\n

\nFactor in the economic externalities SO so studiously ignores,\nand there’s even less contest.\nAlready\n\nthose new EPA rules on arsenic, acid gases, and other pollutants<\/a>\nare factors in\n\nSO closing some coal plants<\/a>\n(although not so far\n\nthe three biggest CO2 emitters in the U.S.<\/a>, Scherer and Bowen in Georgia\nand Miller in Alabama).\nEventually eminent current and former regulators, governors, and legislators\nwill stop\n\nmaking excuses for fracking<\/a>\nand EPA will regulate that, too, driving the price of shale gas up.\nEventually SO shareholders will pass those\n\ncoal ash and political spending transparency resolutions<\/a>\nand coal power prices will go through the roof.\nAnd with \neven science misunderstanderers now finally getting climate change<\/a>\nafter Hurricane Sandy,\nand as the\n\nrecord heat<\/a> and\n\nprotracted drought<\/a> get worse,\npeople will demand our water not be\n\nwasted in fracking<\/a>\nor\n\nby coal or nuclear power plants.<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nAll that and already more than a year ago\n\nBrookings claimed clean jobs outnumbered fossil fuel jobs<\/a>,\nand good-paying jobs, at that.\nGoogle warned even earlier that\n\ndelaying solar will cost the U.S. millions of jobs,<\/a>\nespecially solar jobs.\nWith Georgia Power holding us back, Georgia is losing more\njobs proportionally than the rest of the country.\nGeorgia\n\ncould benefit more from solar electricity than all but two other states.<\/a>\nSo let’s get on with\n\nclean green jobs for\nprofit,\nenergy independence,<\/a>\npoverty reduction, social inclusion,\nand oh by the way clean air and plenty of clean water!\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nIf\n\nthey can do it in Buffalo, we can do solar here:<\/a>\ngo to\n\nMud Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant<\/a> and see for yourself!\n\n<\/a>\nJerome Tucker and MAGE Solar explained more than a year ago\nat Lowndes High how\n\nsolar means jobs in south Georgia,\nin distribution, installation, training, etc.<\/a>\nOur Industrial Authority now has Georgia Power actively helping\ntry to\n\nbring solar industry here.<\/a>\nLet’s see Georgia Power go the next step and get that 1973 law out of\nthe way of financing.\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nSouthern Company and Georgia Power:\n\nthe solar train is leaving the station<\/a>.\nIt’s time to get your nuclear buggywhip and your cancer-causing coal\nand your water-polluting shale gas fracking out of the way.\nHelp us let the sun shine jobs on south Georgia!\n<\/p>\n

\n-jsq\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Somebody is willing to read the sunshine writing: Renewables are Winning, Nukes are Dead and Coal is Crashing, as Kathleen Rogers and Danny Kennedy wrote for EcoWatch 14 Dec 2012. As I wrote back in April when formerly coal-plotting Cobb EMC went solar: Coal is dead. Nuclear is going down. Solar will eat the lunch […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,556,606,47,141,216,1127,14,15,16,50,8,18,558,2,41,19,20,267,570,104,559,21,22,32,23,73,289,24,53,178,55,89,36],"tags":[8736,8779,8794,8719,8745,8753,8818,8717,1132,28,8704,8705,1082,8706,8722,308,8701,8708,8781,8699,8718,8709,560,8702,8710,12,7,8757,8783,25,562,8737,8782,1136,8711,1133,1134,975,107,8712,8715,29,218,1131,8713,1129,8731,702,955,8758,970,1128,1135,1137,8714,1130,108,8725,6,8749,8727,8735,8716],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-air","category-austinenergy","category-climate-change","category-co2","category-coal","category-cobb-emc","category-economy","category-education","category-environment","category-epa","category-georgia","category-georgia-power","category-germany","category-government","category-health-care","category-history","category-law","category-mage-solar","category-military","category-nuclear","category-oil","category-planning","category-politics","category-pollution","category-renewable-energy","category-safety","category-science","category-solar","category-sustainability","category-vlcia","category-water","category-weather","category-wind","tag-activism","tag-air","tag-austinenergy","tag-climate-change","tag-co2","tag-coal","tag-cobb-emc","tag-community","tag-computer","tag-cost","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-energy-independence","tag-environment","tag-epa","tag-fracking","tag-georgia","tag-georgia-power","tag-germany","tag-government","tag-health-care","tag-history","tag-hurricane-sandy","tag-lake","tag-law","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-mage-solar","tag-military","tag-moores-law","tag-natural-gas","tag-nuclear","tag-oil","tag-outages","tag-planning","tag-plant-bowen","tag-plant-miller","tag-plant-scherer","tag-plant-vogtle","tag-politics","tag-pollution","tag-price","tag-profit","tag-pv","tag-renewable-energy","tag-resolution","tag-safety","tag-savannah","tag-savannah-river","tag-science","tag-shale-gas","tag-shareholder","tag-smart-grid","tag-social-inclusion","tag-solar","tag-solar-photovoltaic","tag-southern-company","tag-sustainability","tag-valdosta","tag-vlcia","tag-water","tag-weather","tag-wind"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-4a","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}