Georgia Power will buy solar by 2015, By Associated Press – Athens Banner-Herald, 24 July 2011:
Continue readingATLANTA — 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.
Kristi E. Swartz wrote in the AJC today, Georgia Power trashes regulatory staff’s financial proposal for Vogtle cost overruns:
The PSC deal sounds fair to me, or actually rather generous.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.
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.Privatize the profits; socialize the risks! That’s the ticket!“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.
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.
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PS: Owed to Mandy Hancock.
Solar Power Generation in the US: Too expensive, or a bargain? by Richard Perez, ASRC, University at Albany, Ken Zweibel, GW Solar Institute, George Washington University, Thomas E. Hoff, Clean Power Research. That’s Albany, New York, but it applies even more to Albany, Georgia and Lowndes County, Georgia, since we’re so much farther south, with much more sun.
Let’s cut to the chase:
The sun supplies solar power when you need it: at the same time the sun drives heat waves.The fuel of heat waves is the sun; a heat wave cannot take place without a massive local solar energy influx. The bottom part of Figure 2 illustrates an example of a heat wave in the southeastern US in the spring of 2010 and the top part of the figure shows the cloud cover at the same time: the qualitative agreement between solar availability and the regional heat wave is striking. Quantitative evidence has also shown that the mean availability of solar generation during the largest heat wave driven rolling blackouts in the US was nearly 90% ideal (Letendre et al. 2006). One of the most convincing examples, however, is the August 2003 Northeast blackout that lasted several days and cost nearly $8 billion region wide (Perez et al., 2004). The blackout was indirectly caused by high demand, fueled by a regional heat wave3. As little as 500 MW of distributed PV region wide would have kept every single cascading failure from feeding into one another and precipitating the outage. The analysis of a similar subcontinental scale blackout in the Western US a few years before that led to nearly identical conclusions (Perez et al., 1997).
In essence, the peak load driver, the sun via heat waves and A/C demand, is also the fuel powering solar electric technologies. Because of this natural synergy, the solar technologies deliver hard wired peak shaving capability for the locations/regions with the appropriate demand mix peak loads driven by commercial/industrial A/C that is to say, much of America. This capability remains significant up to 30% capacity penetration (Perez et al., 2010), representing a deployment potential of nearly 375 GW in the US.
The paper identifies the problem I’ve encountered talking to local policy makers, especially ones associated with power companies: Continue reading
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.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.
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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
Here’s where:
Residential Green Energy Signup.
You get a separate line item on your bill for whichever one you buy.
- Standard Green Energy Option: $3.50 (plus tax) a month per 100 kWh block.
This option delivers Green-e Energy certified renewable energy that is generated entirely by biomass.- Premium Green Energy with Solar Option: $5.00 (plus tax) a month per 100 kWh block.
This option delivers Green-e Energy certified renewable energy that contains a mix of at least 50% solar and 50% biomass energy.
Some people claim that there’s no way to do this because it’s just electrons once it gets on the wire. Sure, and money is just dollars once you spend it. But contracts can determine where those dollars go, and in exchange for what:
Due to the way electricity is transmitted and distributed, energy purchased or produced from renewable energy resources may not be specifically delivered to you. However, the renewable energy you purchase will be added to the power grid and will displace incremental power that would have otherwise been produced from traditional generating resources.So as Jaime Hockin advised, if you want to show you want renewable energy, and you are a Georgia Power customer, sign up and Georgia Power will hear you!
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According to PR from Southern Company, 25 May 2011, Southern Company Holds Annual Meeting of Shareholders
Sure, he listed renewable energy and energy efficiency last. But this is the same Thomas A. Fanning who said in May that he’s “bullish” on solar. The same CEO of the parent company of Georgia Power, which just connected a 300 kiloWatt solar plant in Lowndes County. The same CEO who’s being nagged by the Georgia PSC chairman “to come up with options in the next 30 days for expanding the tiny amount of electricity generated from solar power.” And a company that spends more than $20 billion on new energy projects can afford a few tens of millions for community refitting and solar.Fanning also emphasized a continued commitment to the communities the company serves and stressed the need for a national energy policy and a robust research and development initiative.
“Southern Company keeps customers at the center of every decision we make,” said Fanning. “We remain committed to providing reliable, affordable energy for our customers and to do that we need to maintain a diverse fuel mix as well as stay focused on developing the newest technologies.”
Referencing a diverse fuel mix, Fanning highlighted the company’s commitment to nuclear energy, including building the nation’s first new units in 30 years. He also discussed the importance of preserving coal – America’s most abundant energy resource – as well as the role of natural gas, renewable energy and energy efficiency in meeting its customers energy needs.
“Furthermore, we are the only company in the industry that is doing it all. We’ve committed more than $20 billion to these efforts,” Fanning said.
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According to Larry Elliott in the Guardian, 3 October 2010, 10,000 Birmingham council homes to get solar panels: City agrees £100m scheme, partly funded by banks and energy suppliers, to meet target for cutting carbon emissions
Energy efficiency and solar power to create jobs!Plans to fit power generating solar panels to council-owned properties in Birmingham will be pushed forward this week after the council agreed a “green new deal” scheme covering 10,000 homes.
In the biggest proposal for retrofitting houses through an energy efficiency upgrade yet seen in the UK, the council agreed a £100m proposal last week designed to create jobs and meet the city’s ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions.
The plan – Birmingham Energy Savers – will be jointly funded by Birmingham council and investment from energy suppliers and commercial banks, and follows two successful pilot schemes conducted in Europe’s biggest local authority.
We have local proof of concept right next door Continue reading
Kristi E. Swartz wrote in the AJC 8 June 2011, Regulator: Georgia Power needs more solar sources
Georgia Power responded saying they would “comply”. Which doesn’t mean much since there’s nothing but one person’s opinion to comply with.Georgia utility regulator Lauren McDonald wants Georgia Power to come up with options in the next 30 days for expanding the tiny amount of electricity generated from solar power..
“I think we need to take an aggressive move and explore what we can do,” McDonald, a veteran member of the Public Service Commission, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I don’t think the company and even our staff has been challenged to the degree that they should be.”
I tend to agree with Neill Herring on this one:
Neill Herring, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club, called the action “back scratching.”So I guess we need to be more vocal to get them to scratch harder.“They both get to look responsible,” said Herring, adding that there’s a growing and vocal solar lobby in Georgia. “They have to deal with those people. That’s what this is about.”
The article notes:
Which of course are both bogus excuses, since solar already costs less than nuclear to deploy, andGeorgia Power has resisted building solar and other alternative energy projects for years, citing cost and a cloudy Southeast as the two main issues.
Georgia Power’s own web pages admit that:
…insolation values in Georgia are significant enough to support solar energy systems in our state, with the southern two-thirds of Georgia having equivalent solar insolation values to most of the state of Florida.Also more sun than Houston, which is busily deploying solar, and the same amount as Austin, which is a national leader in solar.
Maybe some cities also could suggest Georgia Power do something.
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PS: Claudia Collier pointed out this AJC article.
Do you know of any grant funds we could look at for solar panel conversion on some buildings?DSIRE has most of what I know about GA solar incentives.
There’s also the Georgia Solar Energy Association They have a page on incentives.
You may also notice Hannah Solar among GSEA’s sponsors. Hannah Solar knows quite a bit about incentives; their CEO Pete Marte was at the governor’s signing of the recent expansion of state incentives. More about HB 346.
It might be worth talking to Georgia Power. Their new CEO claims to be “bullish on solar”, they just connected Wiregrass Solar’s plant in Valdosta, and they’re doing various “experiments” and “demonstrations”. Maybe they need to do a demonstration above Valdosta City Hall’s parking lot….
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