The Vogtle $913 million cost overrun by itself could have paid for
approximately 1,000 megawatts of natural gas generation; 450 megawatts
of wind power; and 330 megawatts of solar power.
That’s not 20 gigawatts.
But the population of Germany is about 81 million,
while the population of Georgia is about 9.8 million people,
so the Georgia equivalent of 20 gigawatts would be about 2.4 gigawatts.
The federal government has guaranteed about $8.3 billion in loans
related to Plant Vogtle.
That $8.3 billion would pay for about 3 gigawatts of solar power.
That
big dish at Plant Vogtle?
That’s not just a nuclear containment vessel,
it’s a solar prevention wall.
Preventing jobs, energy independence, and profit through solar power in Georgia.
Plant Vogtle is why Georgia is not a leader in solar power today.
Lowndes County would be a T-SPLOST donor county: it would put more money into T-SPLOST than it would get back for projects.
Somebody (I think it was Robert Yost) asked whether Lowndes County would be a donor county for T-SPLOST. Corey Hull said yes, that was the case. Someone else noted:
Atkinson County that’s been coming over here spending our money all these years, gets a little of it back.
And the smaller counties get penalized a lot more if they vote against T-SPLOST, because they depend much more on LMIG.
So T-SPLOST among other downsides is a scheme to pit smaller counties against larger ones in the T-SPLOST region.
Lowndes County donor county T-SPLOST Public Meeting, Southern Georgia Regional Commission (SGRC), Corey Hull, Nolen Cox, Gretchen Quarterman, Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 19 September 2011. Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour—equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity—through the midday hours on Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank said….
Norbert Allnoch, director of the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry (IWR) in Muenster, said the 22 gigawatts of solar power per hour fed into the national grid on Saturday met nearly 50 percent of the nation's midday electricity needs….
The record-breaking amount of solar power shows one of the world's leading industrial nations was able to meet a third of its electricity needs on a work day, Friday, and nearly half on Saturday when factories and offices were closed.
Berlin is at more than 52 degrees north latitude. Even southern German city Munich is at 48 degrees north. That's a thousand miles north of where we sit here in south Georgia at 31 degrees north.
Germany has sun like Alaska, while Georgia has sun like the south of Spain.
"Never before anywhere has a country produced as much photovoltaic electricity," Allnoch told Reuters. "Germany came close to the 20 gigawatt (GW) mark a few times in recent weeks. But this was the first time we made it over."
A city of Cumming audio-visual recording policy sheet was available outside council chambers.
“Handheld audio and/or visual recording devices may be used from any location within the public seating area,” wrote Gerald Blackburn, city administrator. “No audio and/or visual recording device may be set up in the aisles.”
Corey Hull explained what the state of Georgia has in store for us if we vote down T-SPLOST:
If the voters do not approve the referendum, then all local governments must match their LMIG funds a rate of 30%. And then we have to wait 24 months to start the process over again. And when I say start the process over again, I mean start the process over to enact this tax.
Nolen Cox, Chairman of the Lowndes County Republican Party (LCRP), remarked:
Is that commonly called a stick?
Gretchen Quarterman, Chairman of the Lowndes County Democratic Party (LCDP), observed:
It looks like a baseball bat.
Now I doubt either were speaking in an official capacity, but I know from talking to them that both individuals oppose this tax, and I’m pretty sure most people in their local parties do, too.
T-SPLOST: stick or baseball bat?
T-SPLOST Public Meeting, Southern Georgia Regional Commission (SGRC), Corey Hull, Nolen Cox, Gretchen Quarterman, Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 19 September 2011. Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
At Southern Company’s (SO) shareholder meeting, I enumerated some examples in the U.S., Japan, and Germany of nuclear gone bad, and pointed out Japan, Germany, and even Bulgaria had already or were getting out of nuclear, while Southern Company and Georgia continued to bet the farm on nuclear, and I asked what was SO’s exit strategy for when that bad bet goes bad? SO CEO Thomas A. Fanning said they had learned everything there was to learn from Fukushima, and besides Plant Vogtle is 100 miles inland where there are no earthquakes. He didn’t mention the same description applies to Chernobyl. He did say SO planned to make the U.S. nuclear industry the best in the world.
You kept using big bets and then bet the farm. Very interesting terminology.
Regarding operations credibility, a year ago Vogtle Unit 1 shut down 2 days after the NRC gave Vogtle a clean bill of health. But the SO CEO says it’s all better now.
Here’s the video, followed by links to sources for the points I made:
Exit strategy for when this big nuclear bet goes bad? –John S. Quarterman Shareholder Meeting, Southern Company (SO), Callaway Gardens, Pine Mountain, Georgia, 23 May 2012. Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
Here are the main points I was reading from, with links:
Remember the Southern Company brags about “Our competitive generation business”. The important word there is “our”, as in the Southern Company and its subsidiary Georgia Power gets to compete, and you don’t. Unless you’re big enough.
Some retail competition has been present in Georgia since 1973 with the passage of the Georgia Territorial Electric Service Act. This Act enables customers with manufacturing or commercial loads of 900 kW or greater a one time choice in their electric supplier. It also provides eligible customers the opportunity to transfer from one electric supplier to another provided all parties agree.
Because of that law, you can’t you put up solar panels on your own land and sell your power to somebody somewhere else. And you can’t get a company like SolarCity or Lower Rates for Customers to put up solar panels on your property and sell you the power ( or can you?). Unless you’re generating at least 900 KW; then maybe you can get selected businesses to switch to your power once. Except you probably still won’t qualify, because
Continue reading →
I think of Georgia Power more as like IBM when minicomputers came out. IBM built bigger mainframes. The Internet started to spread, and IBM pushed its own proprietary SNA network. (Remember SNA? I didn’t think so.) Then PCs came out, and IBM layoffs started….
Everybody except for Georgia is jumping on the wind and solar bandwagon, but Georgia Power is side-lined in a nuclear jam like a horse-buggy manufacturer at the dawning of the Ford assembly line.
The white area on that map is for states that have no standards or goals for renewable energy.
Remember Georgia Power is the biggest part of its parent, The Southern Company, and the nuclear units at Plant Vogtle (operating and planned) are actually owned by another offshoot of The Southern Company. According to Southern Company’s webpage, Megawatts and Markets,
Southern Company regulated regional electric utilities serve a 120,000-square-mile territory in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi. Our competitive generation business extends to markets in six southeastern states.
It’s interesting how similar the Southern Company’s markets are to the states in that white southeast no-renewable-energy-portfolio area!
Nuclear is our only emissionless technology, said Southern Company (SO) CEO Thomas A. Fanning. That would indicate that solar and wind have emissions. I assume he just mis-spoke in his otherwise masterful responses (often not answers) to shareholder questions.
Slides and sound for CEO Fanning’s main presentation are available on SO’s website. He indicated SO is unmatched in a combination of financial aspects, including dividends that have steadily increased year after year, and especially investment stability. He neglected to mention that much of those dividends are made possible by Georgia Power’s guaranteed profit margins. He did find time to oppose big government regulation, which is ironic, since Southern Company is a big beneficiary of Georgia’s numerous regulations benefitting Georgia Power. He also bragged about the Georgia legislature passing the “Energy Rate Increases to Finance Nuclear Power Plant Construction”.
On the eve of Southern Company (NYSE: SO) holding its annual meeting
of stockholders in Pine Mountain, GA., the nonprofit Green America
released a report today ranking the major U.S. power producer as
“the United States’ most irresponsible utility.”
Titled “Leadership We Can Live Without: The Real Corporate Social
Responsibility Report for Southern Company,” the Green America
analysis assigns letter grades to seven major U.S. utilities on four
fronts: reliance on coal; pollution; reliance on and expansion of
nuclear power; and lobbying expenditures. Southern came in dead last
with straight “F” grades in all four of the categories.
The PR and the report have a lot more detail, such as this:
Clean Air Task Force data shows that Southern Company’s coal-fired
power plants cause 1,224 deaths, 1,710 heart attacks, 20,770 asthma
attacks, and 752 cases of chronic bronchitis per year. The total
annual cost of all of this damage is over $9 billion.
Hey, that’s more than the original projected cost of the new nukes!
Georgians, do you like trading your health for SO’s
coal plants
and its nuclear boondoggle?
The Vogtle $913 million cost overrun by itself could have paid for approximately 1,000 megawatts of natural gas generation; 450 megawatts of wind power; and 330 megawatts of solar power.
That
big dish at Plant Vogtle?
That’s not just a nuclear containment vessel,
it’s a solar prevention wall.
Preventing jobs, energy independence, and profit through solar power in Georgia.
