\r\n\r\nIf Georgia was starting from scratch, it would not build a nuclear\r\npower plant….\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\n\r\n
<\/a>\r\nAn analyst working for state regulators, Philip Hayet, said in\r\nwritten testimony that the total costs of building two more nuclear\r\nreactors at Plant Vogtle (VOH’-gohl) is more expensive than the\r\nnext-best option, constructing natural gas plants.\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\nStill, Hayet said it is cheaper in most scenarios to finish the\r\nnuclear plant rather than halt the project and instead build natural\r\ngas plants.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
\r\nBut it’s not<\/em> cheaper to finish a nuke than to halt it and\r\nget on with wind offshore and distributed solar power throughout Georgia.\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\nGA PSC didn’t publish Hayet’s calculations, using the old excuse of\r\n“they involve proprietary financial information from Southern Co. subsidiary Georgia Power”.\r\nBut Edison Electric Institute didn’t need any proprietary financial\r\ninformation to compute that\r\n\r\ndistributed solar power is already disrupting the century-old baseload\r\nbusiness model<\/a>\r\nthat has been used to justify nukes new or old.\r\nWe don’t need any proprietary information to see that\r\nMoore’s Law for solar<\/a> is pushing prices down and deployments\r\nup like compound interest.\r\nFrom\r\n\r\nEEI’s January 2013 report<\/a>:\r\n
\r\nBloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) projects that distributed solar capacity will grow rapidly as a result of the competitive dynamics highlighted. BNEF projects 22-percent compound annual growth in PV installations through 2020, resulting in 30 gigawatts (GW) of capacity overall (and approximately 4.5 GW coming from distributed PV). This would account for 10 percent of capacity in key markets coming from distributed resources and even a larger share of year-round energy generated. \r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n\r\n
<\/a>\r\nAnd BNEF’s numbers are actually low according to\r\nFERC’s figures<\/a>\r\non actual installed capacity in 2011 and 2012\r\nfor each power source in the U.S.\r\nFERC’s figures show 60.9% compound annual growth rate for solar\r\nand 22.8% for wind, with nothing else anywhere close:\r\nnot natural gas, not coal with plants closing, and certainly not nuclear.\r\nProjecting FERC’s figures out a few years, solar passes coal in about 8 years,\r\nwind in about 9, and natural gas in about a decade.\r\nThat’s for total amount of installed capacity.\r\n
\r\nGeorgia can continue to\r\n\r\nlag behind small northern states like New Jersey<\/a>,\r\n\r\n
<\/a>\r\nor Georgia Power and Southern Company\r\n\r\ncan help Georgia lead the southeast\r\nand the world in solar and wind power<\/a>.\r\nGA PSC can help them make that right choice:\r\nright for the environment, right for jobs and energy independence for Georgians,\r\nright for the ratepayers and taxpayers of Georgia,\r\nand right for the bottom line of Georgia Power and Southern Company.\r\n
\r\n -jsq\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If new nukes make no sense because of natural gas prices, they make even less sense with continually-dropping solar power prices. Ray Henry wrote for AP yesterday, Regulator: New nuke plant now wouldn’t make sense, If Georgia was starting from scratch, it would not build a nuclear power plant…. An analyst working for state regulators, […]","protected":false},"author":3,"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":[142,14,17,19,6124,104,23,24,36],"tags":[8746,8704,8707,8701,8709,8702,12,7,562,8737,107,384,8713,8714,60,6,8716],"class_list":["post-5159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cwip","category-economy","category-ga-psc","category-history","category-natural-gas-2","category-nuclear","category-renewable-energy","category-solar","category-wind","tag-cwip","tag-economy","tag-ga-psc","tag-georgia","tag-history","tag-lake","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-natural-gas","tag-nuclear","tag-plant-vogtle","tag-rates","tag-renewable-energy","tag-solar","tag-tax","tag-valdosta","tag-wind"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-1ld","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5159","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5159"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5161,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5159\/revisions\/5161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}