Category Archives: Renewable Energy

Solar already beats gas

Here’s an answer to the question of How long until solar beats gas?

Gayle Reaves wrote for fwweekly 11 July 2012, Serious about Solar,

Even on not-so-sunny days, solar still produces. David Power, deputy director of Public Citizen’s Texas office, said that back in February, when cold weather and power plant outages produced blackouts, CPS‘ solar farm was on line and producing. “It was a pretty nasty day, cloudy, and there was a couple of inches of ice on the solar farm,” he said. “But they were still getting 30 to 35 percent of normal production out of it, even on the worst day you could imagine.”

Costs for solar panels have dropped dramatically in the last few years, although by some measures solar energy is still more expensive than that from gas-burning plants.

Power said that the comparisons that show solar to be more expensive are measuring the cost of building a solar plant compared to generating power from a fossil-fuel plant that may have been built and paid for decades ago. In marginal cost comparisons, he said, solar power comes out as costing either the same or less than building a new natural gas plant. “For that you have to get air quality permits and pay for fuel costs,” he said. “For the other, the sun shines, you get electricity, and you just have to wash it off once in a while if it doesn’t rain.”

So the answer is it’s already happened: solar beats gas now. So Southern Company’s fracking plan B makes no more sense than its nuclear Plan A.

-jsq

Live streaming of Public Service Commission Forum tonight

All candidates for the Georgia Public Service Commission at a forum tonight, 7-9PM 12 July 2012. GA PSC is the body that says Georgia Power can charge its customers for cost overruns for the new nukes at Plant Vogtle; the new nukes that will suck up even more water and are already sucking up lots of money through the stealth tax Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) charge on Georgia Power customer bills. GA PSC did require Georgia Power to buy 50 MW of solar, but that’s pennies compared to the dollars Georgia Power and Southern Company are shovelling into that pit by the Savannah River. Who will stand up and say enough nuclear is too much, and let’s get on with solar and wind?

Georgia Interfaith Power and Light blogged today, PSC Debate Tonight,

Tonight, GIPL is joining forces with 14 local organizations to host a Political Forum with this year’s candidates for the Public Service Commission.

We’re having technical difficulties with the live web stream. We hope it will be up and running tonight, but if not, the debate will be posted online this week. You can check this website tonight at 7pm for live web streaming, or watch our twitter feed @GeorgiaIPL for updates.

When: Thursday, July 12, 7 – 9 p.m.
Where: Glenn Memorial UMC’s Auditorium/Sanctuary
1660 N. Decatur Road
Atlanta, GA 30307

All four challengers in the 2012 race have confirmed their attendance. Participants

Continue reading →

AP nuclear slant through omission

What's missing in AP's reporting and analysis of nuclear cost overruns?

AP published this Tuesday, News Guide: Nuclear industry facing cost pressures, perhaps as a companion to its story of the same day, Building costs increase at US nuclear sites. Like that story, the news guide is full of accurate and useful information about nuclear cost overruns, and even this good bit of analysis:

Q: Why do building costs matter to customers?

A: Because customers ultimately pay for the construction costs as part of their monthly power bills. The more a plant costs, the more customers will pay.

Yep, Georgia Power customers are already paying through that stealth tax, the construction work in progress (CWIP) charge for new nuke electricity they won't get for years if ever.

Yet something is missing. Can you spot it?

Hint:

Q: How does that compare with building coal- or gas-powered plants?

Good question, and AP correctly answers that nuclear plants are far pricier than coal or gas plants.

But are those three the only sources of energy? Where is the comparison to solar and wind power?

Well, maybe AP won't do it, but here it is already, Georgia Power deploys 1 MW solar; could have done 330 MW by now. Short version: for less than the amount of federal loan guarantees for Plant Vogtle, Southern Company could have built Georgia more solar energy production per capita than Germany, the world leader, has.

Why are we letting Georgia Power and the Southern Company pour our money down that pit near the Savannah River when they could be spending it to deploy solar and wind for more jobs, energy independence, and more profit for Georgia Power and SO? Oh, and clean air and plenty of clean water, too.

-jsq

Southern Co. nuclear cost overruns expected? Let’s build solar and wind on time and on budget!

So if Southern Company expected cost overruns at Plant Vogtle, why didn’t they make a better estimate in the first place? What incentive do they have not to continue running up the cost and delaying completion, since they get to keep charging Georgia Power customers for construction, including for cost overruns, while floating $8.3 billion in federally guaranteed loans? Where is the financial integrity in all that?

AP reported yesterday, and even Fox News carried it, Building costs increase at US nuclear sites. They’re not talking about housing prices near the sites, either.

America’s first new nuclear plants in more than a decade are costing billions more to build and sometimes taking longer to deliver than planned, problems that could chill the industry’s hopes for a jumpstart to the nation’s new nuclear age.

Licensing delay charges, soaring construction expenses and installation glitches as mundane as misshapen metal bars have driven up the costs of three plants in Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina, from hundreds of millions to as much as $2 billion, according to an Associated Press analysis of public records and regulatory filings.

Those problems, along with jangled nerves from last year’s meltdown in Japan and the lure of cheap natural gas, could discourage utilities from sinking cash into new reactors, experts said. The building slowdown would be another blow to the so-called nuclear renaissance, a drive over the past decade to build 30 new reactors to meet the country’s growing power needs. Industry watchers now say that only a handful will be built this decade.

“People are looking at these things very carefully,” said Richard Lester, head of the department of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Inexpensive gas alone, he said, “is casting a pretty long shadow over the prospects” for construction of new nuclear plants.

AP continues with a list of late and over-budget nuke projects, including Southern Company’s Plant Vogtle $800 million over and seven months late, TVA’s Watts Bar plant $2 billion over and 3 years late, Duke’s Plant Summer SCANA and Santee Cooper’s Summer Station $670 million over and a year late.

Southern Co. and others in the nuclear business say cost overruns are expected in projects this complex…

So why are they wasting our money on nukes when they could be deploying a lot more solar and wind on time and on budget?

…and that they are balanced out by other savings over the life of the plant. Southern Co. expects Plant Vogtle will cost $2 billion less to operate over its 60-year lifetime than initially projected because of anticipated tax breaks and historically low interest rates.

Get that? “anticipated tax breaks” that leave we the taxpayers Continue reading →

Updated LAKE front page with some current hot topics

The LAKE front page is updated with some current hot topics to make LAKE blog posts on them easier to find.

There's a primary election on right now, and in addition to candidates, there's a referendum on T-SPLOST, a new 1 percent transportation sales tax on everything including food that would create a new regional level of government run by GDOT in Atlanta and does nothing for public transportation, bicycles, or pedestrians. It's on the 31 July 2012 primary ballot, and early voting has already started.

Other topics include nuclear and how it's holding back solar and wind, water and how planning can affect it, and the ongoing problem of incarceration including ALEC, the lobbyist-legislator public-private partnership that's pushing all sorts of bad laws. Those and more topics are available through the Categories links on the right hand side of the blog, but some of them are especially current right now, so they're also at the top of the LAKE front page.

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Georgia Power deploys 1 MW solar; could have done 330 MW by now

Let’s compare Georgia Power’s 1 megawatt Upson solar plant with what Georgia Power and Southern Company could be doing if they weren’t wasting so much money on nukes at Plant Vogtle.

S. Heather Duncan reported for the Macon Telegraph, First big Ga. Power solar project comes online in Upson. Yay! Georgia Power and its parent the Southern Company (SO) will have a hard time now saying solar power doesn’t work in Georgia. But let’s compare the megawatts and put that in perspective.

Solar Megawatts

That’s right: we could have had 3,000 times as much solar production by now. All SO would have to do Continue reading →

Automated solar sizing from Rakuten in Japan

Stateside some of the lengthiest parts of a solar installation are finding an installer and getting them to get around to making an estimate. A Japanese retailer is leverage google maps to do all that online.

Asahi Shimbun wrote today, Rakuten to market home solar power systems via mouse click

Online retailer Rakuten Inc. will begin selling residential solar power generation systems this month priced about 40 percent lower than similar conventional products.

Customers can get a price estimate by accessing the new Rakuten Solar website and clicking on the roof of their house on an aerial photo provided by Google Maps, the company said July 9.

The company will be able to cut costs by eliminating the distribution process.

Prices for a detached house will start at 950,000 yen ($12,000), including installation costs. Taxes are not included.

That’s very reasonable. Although the story doesn’t say what sort of size in kilowatts DC or kilowatt hours AC that $12,000 would buy.

A bit more on how it works, and whether we could do that here:

Continue reading →

One Japanese nuclear reactor back online

Not surprising, but quite possibly not a good idea. Mari Yamaguchi wrote for AP yesterday, Japan powered by nuclear energy again, blamed anew,

Nuclear power returned to Japan’s energy mix for the first time in two months Thursday, hours before a parliamentary panel blamed the government’s cozy relations with the industry for the meltdowns that prompted the mass shutdown of the nation’s reactors.

Though the report echoes other investigations into last year’s disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, it could fuel complaints that Japan is trying to restart nuclear reactors without doing enough to avoid a repeat. Thursday’s resumption of operations at a reactor in Ohi, in western Japan, already had been hotly contested.

Government officials and the utility that runs the Ohi plant announced last month that the No. 3 reactor had passed stringent safety checks and needed to be brought back online to ward off blackouts during the high-demand summer months. Another Ohi reactor, No. 4, is set to restart later this month and the government hopes to restart more of Japan’s 50 working reactors as soon as possible.

“We have finally taken this first step,” said Hideki Toyomatsu, vice president of Kansai Electric Power Co., which operates the Ohi plant. “But it is just a first step.”

Maybe they’re like Southern Company (SO) CEO Thomas A. Fanning,who said he’d Continue reading →

Historical Population, Lowndes County, Georgia

Increased population is using increasing resources in Lowndes County, Georgia:

Increased population is using increasing resources

Increased population is using increasing resources
Chart by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE) from Georgiainfo data.

CensusPop.
1830 2,453
1840 5,574
1850 7,714
1860 5,249
1870 8,321
1880 11,049
1890 15,102
1900 20,036
1910 24,436
1920 26,521
1930 29,994
1940 31,860
1950 35,211
1960 49,270
1970 55,112
1980 67,972
1990 75,981
2000 92,115
2010 109,233
Georgiainfo data

The population of Georgia has almost tripled during my lifetime, has about doubled since 1970, and has increased 18% in just the ten years from 2000 to 2010. That blip up between 1950 and 1960 is Moody Air Force Base.

That kind of growth doesn’t happen without increased resource use. If we want a livable county and region for ourselves and our descendants, we need to think about what we’re doing, with water, with transportation, and with energy, not to mention education, jobs, and pretty much everything else. We already cut down and sold off almost all the forests. Now we need better ways than using up all the resources that were here.

Hm, how about some knowledge-based jobs in energy and telecommunications and agriculture?

Speaking of Moody, the U.S. military learned in Afghanistan that shipping oil to places where you can generate solar energy produces a vulnerable supply chain. Moody is already leading in local solar energy. How about we help our base help us help them to move ahead in solar for everybody in Lowndes County and the state of Georgia?

-jsq

Privatizing water: could it happen here?

Water, the next oil: many big companies have already been betting on that for years now. Do we want privatize companies controling our water supplies for their profit, running up prices at our expense? We can prevent that, and we should get on with it.

Jeneen Interlandi wrote for Newsweek 8 October 2010, The New Oil: Should private companies control our most precious natural resource?

…privately owned water utilities will charge what the market can bear, and spend as little as they can get away with on maintenance and environmental protection. Other commodities are subject to the same laws, of course. But with energy, or food, customers have options: they can switch from oil to natural gas, or eat more chicken and less beef. There is no substitute for water, not even Coca-Cola. And, of course, those other things don’t just fall from the sky on whoever happens to be lucky enough to be living below. “Markets don’t care about the environment,” says Olson. “And they don’t care about human rights. They care about profit.”

Well, that couldn’t happen here. Or could it? What about this:

Many of us have no idea where our water comes from….

Do you know what’s upstream of you, that might be getting into your water? Do you know what’s downstream of you, that your runoff migh be getting into? If you’re like me, you’ll have to look that up.

Remember what Ben Copeland said: Orlando, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee “all have their straws in that same aquifer.” The Floridan aquifer, which is the source of most of our drinking water. Our rivers and streams help replenish the Floridan aquifer, but we’re using it up faster than rain falls.

The article goes on about Bolivia privatizing water as a condition of “austerity”, until Continue reading →