Category Archives: Renewable Energy

Fukushima destroying nuclear-owning electric power utilities

The world’s worst nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan has had economic effects on nuclear-owning power utilities. What will happen to the Southern Company as Georgia Power customers and U.S. taxpayers get tired of paying for cost overruns which are already almost a billion dollars?

Erik Kirschbaum wrote for Reuters 26 May 2012, Germany sets new solar power record, institute says,

The German government decided to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, closing eight plants immediately and shutting down the remaining nine by 2022.

And closing those nuclear plants caused German electric utility E.ON to lay off up to 11,000 staff, to take its first quarterly loss in a decade, and to cut its shareholder dividend. According to Forbes, E.ON in 2006 was the biggest electric utility in the world (and TEPCO, owner of the Fukushima nuclear plants, was number 6). In March 2012, E.ON was number 22. (TEPCO dropped from number 6 to number 45.) Southern Company (SO) jumped from number 16 in 2006 to number 6 this year, quite possibly because E.ON and TEPCO and others dropped so rapidly.

Hm, I wonder what Southern Company’s nukes, already almost $1 billion over budget, will do to SO’s ranking in Forbes’ list of top utilities? Maybe there’s a reason Moody’s called nuclear “a bet-the-farm risk”. What will SO do when this big nuclear bet goes bad? And how big a bill do Georgia Power customers and we the taxpayers want to let SO run up that we’ll get stuck with?

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Plant Vogtle is why Georgia is not a leader in solar power today

Could Georgia approach that German 20 gigawatt solar power figure? We’d already be there if we weren’t building Plant Vogtle.

Remember, John Hanger figures:

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.

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Germany solar equal to 20 nuclear plants

What's 20 times more powerful than a nuclear plant and didn't already run a billion dollars over budget? German solar plants!

Erik Kirschbaum wrote for Reuters 26 May 2012, Germany sets new solar power record, institute says,

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."

Maybe it's time for the Southern Company and Georgia Power to get out of the way and let the Georgia legislature change the Georgia Territorial Electric Service Act of 1973 so we can get on with solar power in Georgia. How about if Southern Company and Georgia Power also stop pouring money into the leaking nuclear bucket and buy solar power instead.

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ALEC loses 8 more, including Wal-Mart

Even Wal-Mart ditches ALEC! What about the Southern Company?

ALEC Exposed is keeping a list of Corporations Which Have Cut Ties to ALEC, and since the ten we last counted, eight more have jumped the sinking lobbying ship: Blue Cross Blue Shield, YUM! Brands, Procter & Gamble, Kaplan, Scantron, Amazon, Medtronic, and Wal-Mart. That’s right, even Wal-Mart. Jason Easley wrote for Politicus USA yesterday, Wal-Mart Dumps ALEC and Outs Them as Un-American,

In a statement, Wal-Mart representative Maggie Sans wrote, “Previously, we expressed our concerns about ALEC’s decision to weigh in on issues that stray from its core mission ‘to advance the Jeffersonian principles of free markets…We feel that the divide between these activities and our purpose as a business has become too wide. To that end, we are suspending our membership in ALEC.”

Wal-Mart claimed that ALEC was no longer as interested in Jeffersonian free market principles as they were other partisan political issues. Two of those unnamed political issues are most certainly voter ID and stand your ground laws.

When even Wal-Mart complains that ALEC isn’t “free market” enough, Wal-Mart, which Continue reading →

Exit strategy for when this big nuclear bet goes bad? –John S. Quarterman @ SO 2012-05-23

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.

Um, the title of SO’s corporate biography that SO was giving out in the lobby in paper, video, and audiobook formats is Big Bets: Decisions and Leaders That Shaped Southern Company. And ‘nuclear’s “bet-the-farm” risk’ is, as I mentioned, bond-rater Moody’s phrase.

He said the new Plant Vogtle units were planned for $14 billion and 10 years to build, and

…it is a big investment.

He said a company to do such a thing needed scale, financial integrity, and existing credibility of operations.

Scale seems to me a problem, since SO seems deadset on building mainframes in a networked-tablet world.

SO’s nuclear financial track record is that four nuclear plants were originally planend for Plant Vogtle at a cost of $660 million and only two were built at a cost of $8.87 billion. The new units at Plant Vogtle are already overbudget by almost a billion dollars. The Georgia Power bonds that SO CEO Fanning mentioned: aren’t they guaranteed by the $8.33 billion federal loan guarantee?

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:

Continue reading →

In Georgia, “competitive” is not for you!

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.

According to the Georgia Public Service Commission:

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.

This is apparently only one of twelve Georgia laws that impede a competitive solar power market. But this Territoriality Law alone might be enough of an impediment. Here’s a guide, and here’s the text of the Georgia Territorial Electric Service Act.

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 →

Georgia Power, nuclear buggy whip manufacturer

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….

Glenn Carroll wrote for Georgia Wand today, Georgia Power Stuck in a Nuclear Jam,

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!

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Shareholder Questions to Southern Company

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”.

During the Q&A session, I congratulated CEO Fanning on his 62% compensation raise last year, and noted that Georgia Power customers also got a raise, Continue reading →

Southern Company Rated Worst of Seven Major U.S. Utilities

Southern Company, Number One! In failing grades, that is. Room for improvement in renewable energy.

Green America press release dated 24 May 2011, Southern Company Rated Worst of Seven Major U.S. Utilities: Southern Gets Straight “F”s in Grading of “The Dirty Seven” Utilities, Also Home to Three of 10 Worst-Polluting Power Plants in U.S.,

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?

Or would you rather Southern Company and Georgia Power spend less for more electricity by following Austin Energy and Cobb EMC into solar power, plus wind off the coast, for jobs, for energy independence, for health, and for profit?

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Saudi Arabia turns from oil to sun: $109 Billion Plan

When the world's biggest oil producer plans to shift to solar energy, maybe it's time for the rest of the world to realize there's money in solar energy.

Sarfaraz Khan wrote for Solar PV Investor 17 May 2012 Saudi Arabia, The Land of Plenty For Solar: Saudi Arabia's energy strategy plans to add 41GW to the national grid in 20 years through investments of $109B.

Ali Al Naimi, surprised the global solar stage with his grand announcement, “Saudi Arabia aspires to export as much solar energy in the future as it exports oil now.”

That was two years ago. This month Saudi Arabia held the fourth Saudi Solar Energy forum.

The summit turned out to be extremely successful, as by the end of the meeting, Saudi Arabia officially announced its ambitious solar energy strategy that plans to add 41GW to the national grid in 20 years through investments of $109B. The country currently produces just 3MW from solar. According to the plan, 25GW will be generated from solar thermal plants and 16GW from PV panels. The country aspires to generate a quarter of its total energy from the solar sector by 2032.

It seems the world's biggest oil exporter is planning for a future in which oil is much less important and the sun much more so.

And in that conference:

The companies that participated in the conference included First Solar (FSLR), Amonix, Areva Solar, Abengoa Solar, Novatec Solar, Siemens and Soitec Solar GmbH.

Not a U.S. company in that list. Of course, the U.S. doesn't need Saudi Arabia as a customer if we just get on with solar here at home. Georgia, for that matter, has two solar manufacturers Suniva of Norcross and MAGE SOLAR of Dublin) and more than 40 certified solar installers.

Where's our renewable energy plan?

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