Tag Archives: Georgia Power

San Onofre nuke closing for good –Socal Edison

A big victory today for anti-nuke and pro-solar activists: the leaky San Onofre nukes will stay closed for good! Cost to close them? Between between $450 million and $650. This is after SoCal Edison and 20% owner San Diego Gas & Electric “more than $780 million replacing the steam generators several years ago, which ratepayers are now repaying.” The new Plant Vogtle nukes are already about a billion dollars over and 19 months behind: let’s stop them now before Georgia Power and Southern Company waste any more of our money on them.

PR from SoCal Edison today, Southern California Edison Announces Plans to Retire San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station,

Continue reading →

Birds stop cleanup work at closed Hanford plutonium plant

Birds nested using radioactive mud from WW II-era nuclear bomb production plant, stopping attempts to clean up some of the worst leaking atomic waste, much of which is liquid in leaking tanks near the Columbia River. We have nuclear plants leaking radioactive tritium next to the Chattahoochee and Altamaha Rivers, and radiation is detectible in the Savannah River near Plant Vogtle. How many radioactive solar panels or windmills have you heard of?

Annette Cary wrote for the Tri-City Herald yesterday, Birds at Hanford vit plant spread contaminated waste,

Work stopped Wednesday morning at parts of the Hanford vitrification plant after radioactive contamination was detected under a bird’s nest, according to Bechtel National.

The contamination is suspected of coming from mud used for the nest, which may have belonged to a swallow, said Bechtel spokesman Todd Nelson. Only a small amount of contaminated soil was found, and the contamination was at a low level.

Should workers believe that?

Continue reading →

Kemper Coal cost overruns at Southern Company Stockholder Meeting @ SO 2013-05-22

SO CEO Tom Fanning used Julia O’Neal’s question about cost overruns to tout the alleged benefits of Kemper Coal, which include selling CO2 to oil companies to pump into the ground to produce more oil. He didn’t mention that oil is then burned to produce more CO2. Can you justify the Kemper Plant on your metrics? --Julia O Neal And that Mississippi lignite coal he said would otherwise stay in the ground? Yes it and its CO2 would stay there if SO would get on with solar instead of coal.

Before her question, he had not said much about that project, mostly this about Major Projects, at 29 minutes and 28 seconds in SO’s own video of the 22 May 2013 Southern Company Stockholder meeting. You’ll have to skip there manually, because of the SO’s video format. SO prohibited “unauthorized” videoing, so we don’t have the usual LAKE video on YouTube.

I always call out Vogtle and Kemper County. Both projects are going to serve our customers for decades to come. We’ve had some challenges with Kemper. We’ll probably talk about those later. But when I think about the value that these projects will bring, I think our customers, and the economy of the southeast, will be benefited for decades. And we’re very excited about the progress we’re making on both of those.

It’s curious he mentioned SO’s flagship coal and nuclear projects without saying coal or nuclear. And if by “progress” he means Continue reading →

Bubba McDonald’s solar evangelism

I’ve thanked Bubba McDonald for being serious about solar. However, 500 MW by Georgia Power in several years is nowhere near enough, when New Jersey has 1,000 MW already installed. What we need in south Georgia is distributed solar power for local jobs and direct reduction of electricity bills. Making a solar monopoly as in HB 657 wouldn’t solve that problem; it would actually hinder a real distributed solution. Instead we need to reform that antique 1973 Territorial Electric Service Act to enable financing for distributed solar.

Jim Galloway wrote for the AJC yesterday, GOP revolutionaries push Georgia Power to embrace solar energy,

Lauren “Bubba” McDonald Jr. has spent more than four decades in and around the state Capitol. That fact alone should automatically disqualify him as a rabid revolutionary.

And yet here he is, attempting to force real, radical change upon one of this state’s most staid and revered institutions. McDonald is the leader of a new and very Republican effort to require that Georgia Power give solar energy a chance.

Continue reading →

Solar Effingham County

Somebody wants to build a solar farm in Effingham County, Georgia, has found a location suitable for Georgia Power’s Advanced Solar Initiative program, and is asking the Effingham County Commission to agree.

HMP Solar This item is on the May 7th and May 21st 2013 agendas for the Effingham County Commission:

VI Appearance 5:30 p.m. HMP Solar
Effingham County also has online Meeting Documents for each meeting. The Meeting Documents for May 21st include this memo from their zoning administrator: Continue reading →

Solar park in Ontario –GDF Suez

If a French energy utility can put a 10 megawatt solar park in Ontario, more than a thousand miles north of here, why is Southern Company still locating all its new solar installations in western states and none in Georgia? GDF Suez is starting the new Suez Canal of solar energy. What are Southern Company and Georgia Power doing?

Enerzine.com posted today, GDF Suez met en service son premier parc solaire au Canada, GDF Suez commissioned its first solar park in Canada,

A consortium of GDF Suez Canada, Japan’s Mitsui, and Fiera Axium Infrastructure Tuesday announced the commissioning of a solar photovoltaic farm in Brockville, Ontario, with an installed capacity of 10 MW.

The solar park is comprised of 42,000 solar panels spread over an area of over 32 hectares [79 acres], enough to generate electricity for about 1,700 homes.

The proposed $50 million project benefited from the Feed-in Tarriff (FIT) program. The electricity produced will be sold to the local company in charge of Energy, Ontario Power Authority, for a period of 20 years.

“With Brockville, we diversify our technology base and enter a new and exciting field. We are proud to provide another form of clean, renewable energy to the province and we hope this will be the first of a list of many solar projects,” said Mike Crawley President of GDF Suez Canada.

The project located in Brockville, Leeds County is the first solar power plant operated by the joint venture in Canada. The consortium currently operates in Canada 362 MW of wind power. Other wind projects with a total capacity (300 MW) is under construction in Ontario and British Columbia.

Translation mostly by google translate with a few touches by me.

-jsq

Groundwater wall at Fukushima

Same design as Plant Hatch, which is leaking radioactive tritium into our groundwater. And when contamination gets into the watershed it doesn’t go away; there’s not even an ocean at Hatch or Vogtle for it to disperse into.

Tsuyoshi Inajima and Yuji Okada wrote for Bloomberg News today, Japan Orders Tepco to Build Underground Wall at Fukushima Plant

The Japanese government ordered Tokyo Electric Power Co. to build an underground wall at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant to prevent groundwater from flowing into basements of reactor buildings.

The government plans to set up a task force with Tokyo Electric, construction companies and plant makers by the end of June to discuss the details, Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Toshimitsu Motegi said today in Tokyo. He made the remarks at a meeting with Naomi Hirose, the utility’s president, which was open to reporters.

Tepco has struggled Continue reading →

Privatize TVA? Southern Company would like that

The hydropower assets of the Tennessee Valley Authority would give Southern Company a way to avoid doing distributed solar for a while. Will SO CEO Tom Fanning and Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers bit the bullet and go straight for distributed solar instead of helping Duke privatize TVA for a short-term stopgap that would set both of them farther behind the disruptive solar curve?

SolarCity and Southern Company stock
Blue line: SCTY; red line: SO, chart by Google Finance.
May 16th: Goldman Sachs invested $500 million in SCTY.
May 22nd: SO stockholder meeting.
May 24th: S&P downgrades SO.

Wes Patoka wrote for Motley Fool 24 May 2013, Who Benefits the Most if the TVA Is Privatized,

Continue reading →

SolarCity disrupting utilities in Massachusetts; how about Georgia?

Why is great big Southern Company afraid of tiny SolarCity? Look at these 2.6KW of solar panels on a house in Bedford, Massachusetts. Think about much more sun in Georgia, financed by Google and Goldman Sachs, turning into votes for solar power. Big coal and nuclear boondoggles already don’t look so attractive anymore to investors.

By Giles Parkinson wrote for Reneweconomy on 9 October 2012, SolarCity’s big challenge: Prove that energy bills can fall,

A 2.6kW SolarCity installation in Bedford, Massachusetts SolarCity sees the traditional utilities as their biggest competition. “We compete with them on price, predictability of price and the ease by which customers can switch to electricity generated by solar systems,” it says.

“We have disrupted the industry status quo by providing renewable energy directly to customers for less than they are currently paying for utility-generated energy. Unlike utilities, we sell energy with a predictable cost structure that does not rely on limited fossil fuels and is insulated from rising retail electricity prices. As retail prices for electricity increase and distributed solar energy costs decline, our market opportunity will grow exponentially.”

Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Anthony Kim said the SolarCity filing could be a “game-changing moment for the solar industry” because it shows “how plummeting component costs benefit a company operating on the downstream side of the solar business.”

That article was posted before SolarCity’s stock went public, and before Goldman Sachs invested half a billion dollars in SolarCity. Six months later, we know Southern Company and Georgia Power are paying attention, because both SO CEO Tom Fanning and Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers said so at the Southern Company stockholder meeting.

-jsq

Kemper Coal Crashes Southern Company Rating and Stock Price

Standard & Poor’s lowered Southern Company’s rating from stable to negative because of the risks of Kemper Coal in Mississippi, and SO’s stock price plummetted. This was immediately after activists grilled SO on that and other topics at the SO stockholder meeting. Wait ’till S&P catches on to the risks of SO’s 19-months-late and $1 billion-over-budget nukes at Plant Vogtle in Georgia! Or SO’s non-action so far on the challenge of distributed solar.

Kristin Jones wrote for WSJ 24 May 2013, S&P Lowers Outlook on Southern Co., Noting Project Risks,

Continue reading →