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.

Well, that failed, didn’t it, with the Vogtle project now 19 months behind and around a billion over budget.

And also this back in 2011:

In an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Fanning also said the technology used in a new coal-fired power plant in Mississippi could some day make coal plants in Georgia roughly as clean as natural gas power stations. The plant will use technology that converts coal to gas, stripping about 65 percent of the carbon emissions from it. Fanning said the company wants to expand the technology so it can be used on older coal plants.

With that $540 million writeoff of extra costs, Kemper Coal also isn’t going quite as planned.

Maybe Betty Liu of Bloomberg was right to ask:

This project along with the Vogtle project… has some investors wondering maybe Southern Company has stretched itself too thin, with these two major projects you’ve got under way….

Maybe SO should get on with distributed solar, which can be built on time, on budget, and doesn’t require any federal or state loan guarantees, Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) ratepayer hikes, or cost overrun passthroughs to customers.

As long as SO profits from the Kemper “clean coal” and Vogtle nuke boondoggles, it has incentive not to get on with distributed solar, or wind or efficiency or conservation, for that matter.

-jsq