Tag Archives: Coal

Supplier diversity outreach –David ? @ SO 2012-05-23

What about supplier diversity outreach efforts at Southern Company (SO), asked David (didn’t get his last name; sorry). SO CEO Thomas A. Fanning responded that those efforts were critically important, and part of how they got paid. CEO Fanning added:

When you think about building a nuclear plant, you’re procuring great big huge scale equipment. The minority suppliers really don’t lend themselves to say a gigantic steam turbine or a reactor vessel. But where we can use diverse suppliers in our supply chain efforts, we absolutely do undertake to make sure that they have an opportunity to compete for the business, and we can coach them along to make sure that they are ultimately successful.

Perhaps this monoculture of suppliers for huge equipment is yet another flaw in building mainframes in a networked-tablet world. They could get a lot more diversity by deploying solar power plants throughout sunny south Georgia, especially if they included financing housetop and business roof solar.

Earlier CEO Fanning had gone on at some length about diversity on SO’s all-white board, saying that SO didn’t measure diversity by such metrics as race or ethnicity or gender. Some people wonder if they measure it by different majors at Auburn or Georgia Tech. Not to be ungenerous, I do applaud SO for their diversity outreach efforts.

Here’s the video:

Supplier diversity outreach –David ?
Shareholder Meeting, Southern Company (SO),
Callaway Gardens, Pine Mountain, Georgia, 23 May 2012.
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).

-jsq

What about EMP? –Thomas Griffin @ SO 2012-05-23

Thomas Griffin asked Southern Company (SO) CEO Thomas A. Fanning what SO has done to deal with EMP:

If a foreign entity were to detonate a nuclear device above 25 miles above the United States it would cause an electro-magnetic pulse, which would in fact take out not only the electric grid, but trains, all cars with computers, all radios and TV stations, the telephone company, and we would really be in bad shape, because everything that runs on electricity, which is virtually all businesses would be down.

And my question to you is does Southern Company have backup, shielded, hardware and software to bring a control station back up, shielded from this, so that they could replace it, and bring the grid back on line.

CEO Fanning said he couldn’t talk about specifics, pleading national security. He added:

Rest assured that we pay a lot of attention to preserving the sanctity of the electric networks in the southeast, including things like EMF.

Interesting wording, “sanctity”. I didn’t know electrical production was a religious matter. Probably just a misphrasing.

But the other thing I think you should recognize is that if somebody is detonating a nuclear bomb that is emits an EMF force above the United States we’re in deeper problems already.

CEO Fanning has a point.

Here’s the video:

What about EMP? –Thomas Griffin
Shareholder Meeting, Southern Company (SO),
Callaway Gardens, Pine Mountain, Georgia, 23 May 2012.
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).

-jsq

 

Big bet on solar power? –Sam Booher; Shale and Australia! SO CEO Thomas A. Fanning @ SO 2012-05-23

According to memory, Sam Booher congratulated Southern Company (SO) CEO Thomas A. Fanning on moving away from coal, and recommended big bold bets in solar power. Camera operator error prevented recording what Booher said. I did get video of CEO Fanning’s response, about shale and natural gas, plus Australia.

…the most reliable forms of energy. Today, with the revolution we have seen in the shale gas industry, that tends to be natural gas. And so what we are doing is we are transitioning away from coal towards natural gas. Combined with new environmental regulations that we will comply with.

Those would be the new environmental regulations about which SO Chief Operating Officer Anthony Topazi said last December:

“It’s physically impossible to build the controls, the generation, the transmission and the pipelines needed in three years.”

COO Topazi also projected:

“We will experience rolling blackouts or rationing power if we don’t have simply the time to comply.”

Since SO CEO Fanning didn’t say anything about rolling blackouts or rationing power, I guess SO managed to find a way to comply, just as other power companies said they could at the time. Maybe we shouldn’t pay too much attention to predictions of flickering power from SO.

Back to CEO Fanning:

From an energy standpoint, Southern Company is a little bit smaller, but similar to, the energy production profile of the nation of Australia. We are a great, big company from an energy production standpoint.

According to Forbes 18 March 2012, SO is the largest electric utility in the U.S. by retail sales and number 6 in the world. Back in 2006, Forbes ranked Germany’s E.ON number one in the world, and Japan’s TEPCO as number 6. What happened to E.ON and TEPCO? 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 →

Salute for less coal; how about third-party solar? –Mark Woodall @ SO 2012-05-23

After saluting Southern Company (SO) for burning less coal, Mark Woodall said he was very disappointed to see Georgia Power fight so hard to prevent homeowners from using their own private property to generate and sell solar energy. He quoted SO CEO Thomas A. Fanning’s oft-repeated remark that Fanning is “bullish on solar”. Fanning proceeded to define “bullish” as pie in the sky bye and bye.

We remain very bullish on solar. When we think about renewables, I think renewables are exceedingly important to this nation’s future. My sense is until we see significant technology innovation, my sense is that that will probably very late in this decade or beyond that, we still are gonna get by far the lion’s share of electricity from central stations.

Then he said he was bullish on thin-film solar. Some time in the future or “one day” when Continue reading →

Wind power and the Southern Company –Seth Gunning @ SO 2012-05-23

Seth Gunning from Atlanta spoke at the Southern Company (SO) meeting 23 May 2012 at Callaway Gardens; he was representing the Georgia Sierra Club with 97 shares. SO CEO Thomas A. Fanning graciously greeted him. Gunning brought up health effects of coal plants. Then he talked about two paths.

The way I see it, Southern Company sits at a crossroads. That one path Southern Company continues to drag its feet on the development of renewable energy economies in the southeast. The other path, Southern Company becomes a leader in creating jobs and economic development in clean energy in the south.

He thanked SO for recently partnering with Santee Cooper in the Palmetto Wind Project in South Carolina. It’s curious how there’s been no news whatever about that.

Then Gunning mentioned another wind project:

The state of Georgia is the only Atlantic state not currently working with the Department of Interior to streamline the permitting processes for offshore wind development.

He was referring to the Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy Consortium announced by DoI 8 June 2010. (Not to be confused with Google’s privately-funded Atlantic Wind Connection.) Gunning asked whether the Southern Company would advocate 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!

-jsq

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?

-jsq

Powering North Carolina with wind, sun, and water

Here's some hard evidence of FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff's assertion back in 2009 that baseload is outdated, we don't need any new nukes or coal, because we can get all the new power we need from sun and wind. This study from North Carolina goes further: we don't need coal or nukes at all.

John Blackburn, Ph.D. wrote a report March 2010, Matching Utility Loads with Solar and Wind Power in North Carolina: Dealing with Intermittent Electricity Sources,

Takoma Park, Maryland, and Durham, North Carolina, March 4, 2010: Solar and wind power can supply the vast majority of North Carolina's electricity needs, according to a major report released today. Combined with generation from hydroelectric and other renewable sources, such as landfill gas, only six percent of electricity would have to be purchased from outside the system or produced at conventional plants.

Hourly Power Generation and Load for a sample day in July

"Even though the wind does not blow nor the sun shine all the time, careful management, readily available storage and other renewable sources, can produce nearly all the electricity North Carolinians consume," explained Dr. John Blackburn, the study's author. Dr. Blackburn is Professor Emeritus of Economics and former Chancellor at Duke University.

"Critics of renewable power point out that solar and wind sources are intermittent," Dr. Blackburn continued. "The truth is that solar and wind are complementary in North Carolina. Wind speeds are usually higher at night than in the daytime. They also blow faster in winter than summer. Solar generation, on the other hand, takes place in the daytime. Sunlight is only half as strong in winter as in summertime. Drawing wind power from different areas — the coast, mountains, the sounds or the ocean — reduces variations in generation. Using wind and solar in tandem is even more reliable. Together, they can generate three-fourths of the state's electricity. When hydroelectric and other renewable sources are added, the gap to be filled is surprisingly small. Only six percent of North Carolina's electricity would have to come from conventional power plants or from other systems."

Six percent is a small number. That means most coal plants could be shut down, and no nukes are needed.

Continue reading →