Tag Archives: cost

After Fukushima: Fewer nukes most places; More in Georgia

Most countries are not building more nuclear power plants, and some are shutting down some of the ones they have, because Fukushima has confirmed what Chernoby and Three Mile Island already told us: maybe the physics is sound, but the business model leads to unsafe plants. But in the U.S. and Georgia, it’s full speed ahead for new nukes, regardless of the risks of radiation leaks or cost overruns.

Christopher Joyce wrote for NPR today, After Fukushima: A Changing Climate For Nuclear

“We don’t see Fukushima as having a significant impact on the U.S. industry,” says Scott Peterson, vice president of the industry’s Nuclear Energy Institute. “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was renewing 10 licenses for U.S. plants, extending them 20 years in operation. We were continuing to move forward in examining new reactor designs.”
Nevermind that those extensions mostly go well beyond the design lifespans of the plants extended.
Marc Chupka, who advises electric utilities as an economist with the Brattle Group in Washington, wonders who’s going to pay for them.

“Right now, just the plain economics of nuclear power are underwater,” he says. He notes that over the past decade, construction costs have skyrocketed and natural gas got more plentiful and cheaper.

“Things change significantly over relatively short periods of time,” Chupka says, noting that it takes about a dozen years to plan and build a new nuclear plant. “That makes it an incredibly challenging environment to plan for the long term. And that adds to the risk and it makes investors understandably skittish.”

So we could do what Germany is doing:
Germany says the same: The government will throw its weight and wealth into solar and wind energy to replace nuclear power.
Or we could listen to the same old excuse: Continue reading →

Solar is coming —Michael Noll

Received yesterday on Solar tipping point within a few years. -jsq
In line with comments made by Steven Chu:

Solar cheaper than fossil fuels in a decade, says Steven Chu, by Christopher Mims, 3 November 2011.

Solar power will be cheaper than fossil fuels at some point between the end of this decade and 2026*, said U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu

as well as a recent Op-Ed piece by Paul Krugman:

Here Comes Solar by Paul Krugman, 6 November 2011.

…progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.

This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.

-Michael Noll

I added the blockquotes and the Moore’s Law link. Seems to me physicist Sec. Chu must be looking only at the sticker price, while economist Krugman is also looking at other costs and at externalities not currently included in the sticker price, yet still costing us in other ways. Add in the costs of wars for oil and I wonder how long ago solar already became cheaper than oil….

-jsq

CUEE demolishes its own case

CUEE still doesn’t have a plan for improving education. When asked for any concrete examples of education improving because of school consolidation, not one person could come up with one: not CUEE, not the Chamber, not their invited experts. Their invited experts established that consolidation in Troup County not only didn’t save money, it required a bond issue. And it took four or five years of the hardest work they’d ever done, even though they couldn’t give any evidence that it improved education. It was like that on almost every point: the Chamber and CUEE either couldn’t answer the simplest questions, or even more frequently demolished their own case.

The last question asked to give an example of any company that had declined to come in because of multiple school systems. Not only could nobody give an example, but someone, I believe it was Walter Hobgood, stood up at the podium and said when he was working for a large company he had never encountered a case where they looked at the number of school systems.

Early on Chamber Chair Tom Gooding went on at great length about Continue reading →

Corrected T-SPLOST Southern Region Cost Changes

Received this morning. Many thanks to Corey Hull and SGRC for sending this correction. -jsq
John,

I reviewed your question, and that project had an error in it, I am attaching a new spreadsheet, that is slightly revised. It includes the TIA funding with inflation so that it matches the other project sheets that we have handed out at the public meetings

I am sorry about the confusion this has caused.

Sincerely,
Corey

Corey Hull, AICP
MPO Coordinator
Valdosta-Lowndes MPO

This corrects the earlier post.

The corrected spreadsheet he sent is on the LAKE website in Excel spreadsheet and HTML versions.

In the HTML version, I have added three columns. Name is taken from the Unconstrained Project Listing. Difference and Diff% were computed from the Original total Cost Estimate and the Updated Total Cost Estimate.

The project descriptions may be found in the unconstrained and constrained project lists. More later.

-jsq

T-SPLOST public meeting in Valdosta Monday morning 19 September 2011

The next T-SPLOST public meeting is tomorrow morning:
Monday, September 19, 2011; 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.; at the Valdosta City Hall Annex; 300 North Lee Street, Valdosta, Georgia; presentation will begin at 10:30 a.m.
These meetings are intended to gather public input:
After the public meetings the Roundtable will reconvene to review the public comments and adopt a final Constrained List that will be presented on the ballot to voters in 2012.
If you can’t go to the meeting, you can send in the public comment form or email Corey Hull at the SGRC.

I don’t know what you might want to comment on, but a couple of things that come to my mind are:

-jsq

50% increase for Old US 41 North widening: now $12 million T-SPLOST

In addition to the Draft Constrained List for T-SPLOST draft constrained list of T-SPLOST projects, which doesn’t even include dollar estimates, this longer report contains details for each project. And the cost to widen Old US 41 North from North Valdosta Road to Union Road has gone up from the previous estimate in June of $8 million to $12 million in August, for a 50% increase! I wonder if the County Commissioners know about this rapid cost inflation.
PreviousCurrentDifferenceIncrease%
PE $650,000 $800,000 $150,000 23%
ROW $850,000 $1,200,000 $350,000 41%
CST $6,500,000 $10,000,000 $3,500,000 54%
Total $8,000,000 $12,000,000 $4,000,000 50%
Curious how when the components went up by odd amounts, the total went up by exactly 50%. It’s almost like the total was increased and then the components were arranged to add up to that.

Also curious how the biggest increase, percentage (54%) and total ($3,500,000) is for construction. I could see how Rights of Way (ROW) acquisition costs might go up because people might not want this boondoggle in their front yards, but why was it so hard to estimate construction costs the first time?

And curious how that construction increase is a bit more than Continue reading →

1 in 13 Georgia adults in the prison system —Pew Center on the States

Georgia is number 1 in something: locking people up, 1 in 13 of adults, according to the Pew Center on the States.

That costs us more than a billion dollars a year in tax money, 5.9% of the state budget. That’s up from $133.26 million in 1983, increased by more than a factor of seven.

Meanwhile, the correctional population swelled from around 100,000 in 1982 to more than 550,000 in 2007. And while other states have started decreasing their prison populations, Georgia’s continues to increase. The state is even coming up with new ways to lock people up, such as kicking them out of mental institutions. We seem headed back towards plantation slave labor and prison road gangs in for minor drug infractions.

How about we reverse this trend? Continue reading →

Georgia Power wants taxpayers to take profit risk for new nukes

After already hiking rates to pay for Plant Vogtle units 3 and 4, Georgia Power now balks at taking any risk to its profit if costs go above the projected budget.

Kristi E. Swartz wrote in the AJC today, Georgia Power trashes regulatory staff’s financial proposal for Vogtle cost overruns:

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.

The PSC deal sounds fair to me, or actually rather generous.

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.

“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.

Privatize the profits; socialize the risks! That’s the ticket!

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.

-jsq

PS: Owed to Mandy Hancock.

Solar: jobs, leadership, grid, independence, and health

Peak power when you need it: solar. Somebody has been studying it, and addressing problems local decisionmakers right here in south Georgia have been raising.

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 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 sun supplies solar power when you need it: at the same time the sun drives heat waves.

The paper identifies the problem I’ve encountered talking to local policy makers, especially ones associated with power companies: Continue reading →

Texas still susceptible to private prison boondoggle

Even though Texas has cancelled some prisons and closed at least one private prison, private prison companies continue to push to privatize Texas prison services.

Mike Ward wrote 30 April in the Austin American-Statesman, Lawmakers chafe as push continues to privatize prison health care

“There is a push on to change the system we have, a system that is cost-effective and is a national model, even before we know whether there will be any real savings,” said House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, R-Richardson .

“I think it’s something we should look at, to see what the real facts are, but I don’t think we should be rushing to a decision right now about this,” Madden said. “Most of the Legislature, I believe, think(s) that a decision this big — whether the system should be privatized — is one that we should make, not some board or agency.”

The American-Statesman first reported the privatization efforts in March and that top aides to Gov. Rick Perry have been involved in some of the meetings with vendors and lobbyists.

More from the article: Continue reading →