Tag Archives: Georgia Power

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!

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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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Florida utility delays nuke, asks for rate hike

Florida is already experiencing a likely future for the new Plant Vogtle nukes in Georgia: completion date pushed back, and customer charges raised.

Fred Hiers wrote for Gainesville.com 1 May 2012, Progress asks for nuke fee hike,

Progress Energy announced Tuesday that it is hiking the estimated cost of its proposed Levy County nuclear plant and pushing the plant’s completion date back to 2024.

Progress Energy also said it plans to ask Florida regulators to increase customers’ bills to upgrade Progress’ damaged Crystal River nuclear plant.

Progress said in a press release that the new cost of the plant could be as high as $24 billion. The previous estimate was about $2 billion less. The plant was originally slated to go online in 2016, but that deadline continues to get pushed back.

2016 to 2024? An eight year delay? And from $22 billion to $24 billion, or 9% more? It looks like Progress Energy has started down the path of many $billion cost overruns that The Southern Company and Georgia Power already went down 30 years ago and have already started back down again. Georgia Power customers: don’t be surprised if your rates go up more for nukes that get pushed still farther into the future.

Meanwhile, by John Hanger’s estimates, an extra $1 billion would buy about 450 MW of wind power or about 330 MW of solar power. So that $2 billion expected cost rise would buy about Continue reading →

Google shows the way on offshore wind

Zachary Shahan wrote for CleanTechnica yesterday, Google-backed Offshore Wind Power Superhighway Moves Forward,

The Department of the Interior stated on Monday that there was “no overlapping competitive interest” for the areas where the $5-billion project would be constructed. This decision leads us to the next step in the process — environmental review of the Atlantic Wind Connection line.

The article notes that environmental review could take 18-24 months, with a projected power online date of end of 2017. Southern Company projects Vogtle Unit 3 online in 2016 and Unit 3 in 2017. And that’s before the cost overruns that have already started. I’m guessing Google will have its Atlantic wind project up and running before Southern Company has any new nukes online, if they’re ever online.

And remember, the Atlantic Wind Connection is privately funded:

Other than Google, companies funding the project include Good Energies and Japan’s Marubeni Corp.

The cost is about $5 billion for 6,000 MW of wind energy generation.

Meanwhile, Southern Company has already overrun its nuke cost estimate by almost $1 billion within a few weeks of NRC go-ahead. It won’t take long at that rate for the cost overruns to exceed $5 billion. That’s on top of the perhaps $8.3 billion base cost. That’s for two 1,100 MW reactors, for 2,200 MW total.

What if Southern Company and private investors quit wasting resources on nukes and funded a Georgia Bight Wind Connection instead? After all, Georgia’s offshore waters are part of the East coast wind energy basket.

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