Tag Archives: CWIP

Elect Georgia legislators and Public Service Commissioners who will let the sun shine on Georgia!

Solar PV prices have dropped so much they’re competitive with coal, natural gas, and nuclear. The only thing that stops Georgia from leading the country and the world in solar energy is our legislature and Public Service Commission kow-towing to the electric companies instead of serving the public. How about we elect Georgia legislators and PSC members who will change that?

How about if we elect legislators who will stop approving nuclear boondoggles for Southern Company through a stealth tax on Georgia Power customers? How about we elect Georgia Public Service Commissioners who will stop giving Georgia Power a guaranteed profit through charging cost overruns (already $400 million) for the Plant Vogtle boondoggle to Georgia Power customers?

How about instead we fully fund the existing 35% state tax rebate for renewable energy? Last year Georgia legislators did double the money in that fund, but it’s still only $5 million a year and the funding for 2012 has already been used up. $5 million a year for power after it’s installed, while Georgia Power and Southern Company have already run $400 million over budget on nuclear energy that nobody will see for years, if ever! We need Georgia legislators who understand that Moore’s Law for solar means fast growth; growth in jobs, energy independence, and profit for Georgians.

To bring Georgia to the lead in renewable energy in this country and the world, all we really need to do is to pass something like SB 401 to modify that arrogant dinosaur of a 1973 Georgia Territoriality Electric Service Act that prevents you from getting financing to install solar generation and selling it through the grid at a profit, with the electric utility taking a cut and bragging rights.

It is time to let the south Georgia sun break through the clouds of power utility disinformation and regulatory capture. It is time for us to elect Georgia legislators and Georgia Public Service Commissioners who will let the sun shine on us in Georgia!

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Solar PV costs dropped 50% last year: time for south Georgia to lead in solar power

Solar energy continues to grow by leaps and bounds worldwide. Except in Georgia. Maybe we should change that. There’s an election going on right now.

Frank Jordans wrote for AP 11 June 2012, $257 billion invested in renewable energy in 2011,

Global investment in renewable energy reached a record of $257 billion last year, with solar attracting more than half the total spending, according to a U.N. report released Monday.

Investment in solar energy surged to $147 billion in 2011, a year-on-year increase of 52 percent thanks to strong demand for rooftop photovoltaic installations in Germany, Italy, China and Britain.

Large-scale solar thermal installations in Spain and the United States also contributed to growth during a fiercely competitive year for the solar industry. Several large American and German manufacturers fell victim to price pressure from Chinese rivals that helped to halve the cost of photovoltaic modules in 2011.

Lower solar PV module price should mean more people can afford to install solar electricity, which should mean more jobs for people to install it. How much lower? According to the report:

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GA PSC Forum videos online now

I hear somebody asked about Georgia Power's Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) stealth tax charge to customers for Southern Company's new nukes at Plant Vogtle. Maybe some of these candidates for the Public Service Commission could help get Georgia Power and SO to stop suppressing solar and wind in Georgia, maybe even to lead the way.

GIPL wrote today,

Thanks to everyone who came out to our Political Forum on the Georgia Public Service Commission. We had a great turnout, and learned a lot about the 2012 candidates for the PSC.

This is a statewide election, so please share this video far and wide with your friends. The primary election will be held on July 31, and the PSC will also be on the ballot in November.

Participants in last night's forum included (from left to right) Republican Matthew Reid and Democrat Steve Oppenheimer, who are both challenging incumbent Republican Commissioner Chuck Eaton in District 3, and Republican Pam Davidson and Libertarian David Staples, who are running against incumbent Republican Commissioner Stan Wise in District 5.

Beth Bond from Southeast Green moderated the media panel featuring Kristi Swartz from the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Walter Jones from Morris News Service, and Jonathan Shapiro from WABE.

Georgia Interfaith Power & Light hosted this forum. Co-hosts included 14 local environmental, religious, and advocacy organizations, including Southeast Green, Georgia WAND, GA Sierra Club, Civic League of Regional Atlanta, Glenn Memorial UMC Environmental Committee, GreenLaw, Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance, Common Cause, League of Women Voters, Georgia Watch, Ryan Taylor Architects LLC, Sustainable Atlanta, Regional Council of Churches of Atlanta, Inc., Trinity Presbyterian Church Sustainability Committee, and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

Here's the video:

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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

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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.

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Smart grid already in use due to heat waves

So if heat waves already require spot buys of electricity at high prices and is already enabling a market in demand responses to bring down, even while most electricity in the U.S. still comes from big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear, natural gas, and hydro, why is Southern Company saying we have to wait on a smart grid to deploy solar and wind energy?

This is from an EnerNOC Press Release of today that is all over the net:

…on Thursday, June 21, EnerNOC was dispatched by eleven grid operators and utilities across the US and Canada, including eight in Pennsylvania and New York, largely in response to a record heat wave across the northeast and mid-Atlantic regions that put strain on the grid and drove real-time energy prices in some regions to over $1,500 per megawatt hour, approximately 60 times higher than the previous week’s average prices. Demand response reduces the need for utilities and grid operators to procure additional supply at such high prices both by reducing overall demand on the grid and by targeting reductions in particularly constrained areas.

So demand response is energy conservation through energy distribution efficiency.

Well, maybe demand response duing that heat wave was on a small scale. Or not:

“Nearly 1,200 commercial, institutional, and industrial energy users in Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Ontario, and other constrained regions responded to Thursday’s dispatch, providing valuable capacity to the grid that helped to stabilize prices and reduce system strain,” said Tim Healy, Chairman and CEO of EnerNOC. “Our DemandSMART application, which streams real-time energy data from thousands of sites, showed demand quickly drop from the grid as our network was activated and allowed our customers to see the contribution they were making to grid reliability and reduced prices.

So sure, this is a press release from the company that’s doing this electricity dispatch. But it’s verifiable, starting with the customer company contacts in the press release.

FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff pointed out years ago that Continue reading →

Johnson & Johnson and Dell dump ALEC: where’s Southern Company?

J&J and Dell ditched ALEC, for two dozen bailing out of that ship of dubious lobbying. Where's The Southern Company? Still supporting ALEC's pro-fracking and anti-solar campaign?

A week ago Rebeka Wilce reported for PR Watch that Johnson & Johnson 19th Company, 23rd Private Sector Member, to Cut Ties with ALEC. Today Scott Keyes reported for ThinkProgress that Dell Becomes 21st Company To Drop ALEC. So many companies have ditched the corporate-legislative private-public partnership American Legislative Exchange (ALEC) that it's hard to keep count. Yet we still haven't heard from The Southern Company (SO), even as ALEC continues its drive to dismantle incntives for renewable energy and preserve fracking loopholes, and The Southern Company continues expanding use of natural gas (knowing it comes from fracking) while putting off solar and wind until "one day" some time next decade maybe, and (through its subsidiary Georgia Power) actively opposing fixing Georgia legislative hurdles to renewable energy. All that plus wasting Georgia Power customer cash and taxpayer dollars on useless new nukes at Plant Vogtle.

Come on, Southern Company and CEO Thomas A. Fanning: you can do better than that! Turn to the sun and the wind for clean green jobs for community and profit.

If you're a Georgia Power customer and you'd like to help persuade SO, you can pay your Plant Vogtle Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) charge in a separate check and write on it what you'd like instead. Even if you're not, it's election season, and every member of the Georgia legislature is running: you can contact your candidate and find out what they're willing to do to get us solar and wind for energy independence, jobs, community, and profit.

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SO CEO Fanning: Policy, jobs, and the economy plus fracking

You may have wondered, how was Southern Company (SO) CEO Thomas A. Fanning so ready and able to respond at length to any question at the SO shareholder meeting? Because he’s a class A CEO who does his homework, such as this white paper he wrote dated September 2011: American Energy Policy, Jobs and the Economy, in which he explains what he meant by “the revolution we have seen in the shale gas industry”.

So, natural gas is important, but it’s not a panacea. Here’s why.

First, the reason prices have dropped so far is because of a new technology called fracking, which releases natural gas from so-called tight rock formations, such as shale gas. Fracking is the injection of chemicals underground, which have the effect of fracturing the rock deposits, thereby releasing the natural gas. There are environmental concerns around the chemicals associated with the fracking process. Those concerns have to be resolved.

Those concerns range from polluted groundwater to earthquakes. It’s great that SO is turning away from coal. I don’t think it’s so great to trade dirty air from coal for dirty water and earthquakes from fracking.

Secondly, many of these shale gas deposits are in places where there is no sufficient pipeline infrastructure necessary to move the gas to the places it’s needed to generate the electricity. Pipelines will have to be built. It will take time. We need to resolve that issue, too.

Meanwhile, rooftop solar Continue reading →

Company installs solar and leases it to New Jersey school: you can’t do that in Georgia

Schools can’t do this in Georgia, because of the Territoriality Law. They can’t have a company finance and install solar panels on their property and lease the power from them at a fixed rate. You can’t, either, not even on your own private property. Does that seem right to you?

US DoE EERE wrote (no date), NJ School Installs 6.1 MW Solar System,

A 100-year old private school, Lawrenceville School, in Lawrenceville, N.J., installed a 6.1 megawatt ground-mounted system on 30 acres of school-owned farm land. The system features 24,934 SolarWorld solar panels, manufactured at the company’s U.S. headquarters in Hillsboro, Oregon. KDC Solar leased the land for the project from the school and owns and maintains the solar equipment. Through a power purchase agreement, the Lawrenceville School will buy electricity produced by the array over the next 20 years.

The school says the Lawrenceville Solar Farm was dedicated 4 May 2012., and adds that they also keep bees on the same land, plus what six megawatts means:

The Lawrenceville School Solar Farm consists of a nearly 30-acre, net metered, 6.1 megawatt solar facility, and honey-producing bee hives, which ring the perimeter of the array. The nearly 900,000 resident honey bees are nourished by a special wildflower mixture planted among and around the solar panels. The Farm offsets 6,388 metric tons of CO2 annually, the equivalent of taking 1,253 cars off the road annually.

The 24,934 solar panels generate six megawatts of energy, covering 90 percent of the School’s needs. During the day, the array can produce nearly twice the amount of energy needed by the School. The excess is imported to the local electrical utility, Public Service Electric & Gas (PSE&G) and credited to the School. The School will draw excess energy and all other required energy from PSE&G after sundown.

Here’s a PDF with more details.

The big picture is: you can do that in all but about four states. Georgia is one of those four states, Continue reading →

Clean green jobs for community and profit

Tell me who doesn’t want clean jobs for energy independence and profit?

“Environmental sustainability… can lead to more and better jobs, poverty reduction and social inclusion,”

The above quote is Juan Somavia in an article Stephen Leahy wrote for Common Dreams 1 June 2012, For an Ailing Planet, the Cure Already Exists,

Germany’s renewable energy sector now employs more people than its vaunted automobile industry.

No wonder, when German solar power produces more than 20 nuclear plants. How many jobs? According to Welcome to Germany 13 April 2012, Renewable Energies Already Provide More Than 380,000 Jobs in Germany, which cites a report from the German government,

The boom in renewable energies continues to create new jobs in Germany. According to a recently published study commissioned by the Federal Environment Ministry, the development and production of renewable energy technologies and the supply of electricity, heat and fuel from renewable sources provided around 382,000 jobs in 2011.

This is an increase of around 4 percent compared to the previous year and more than double the 2004 figure.

“Current employment figures show that the transformation of our energy system is creating entirely new opportunities on the job market,” said German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen.

“It is the major project for the future for German industry. This opens up technological and economic opportunities in terms of Germany’s competitiveness as an exporter and location to do business.”

Wouldn’t we like some of that here in sunny south Georgia, a thousand miles south of Germany?

Back to the Stephen Leahy article:

Globally, the renewable energy sector now employs close to five million workers, more than doubling the number of jobs from 2006-2010, according to a study released Thursday by the International Labor Organization (ILO).

The transformation to a greener economy could generate 15 to 60 million additional jobs globally over the next two decades and lift tens of millions of workers out of poverty, concluded the study, “Working towards sustainable development”.

Everyone will benefit. Everyone can benefit starting right now.

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