Tag Archives: Plant Vogtle

More cost overruns at Southern Company’s Kemper Coal in Mississippi

Why all these overruns? All sorts of excuses about everything but bad management and it was a bad idea in the first place. Does anybody believe this coal plant will be completed anywhere near on time? Why not stop wasting money on it and invest in solar and wind instead?

Only a few months after the last cost overruns, Jeff Amy wrote for AP 2 July 2013, Miss. Power: More overruns at Kemper power plant: $4.45B price tag latest estimate,

The unit of Atlanta-based Southern Co. told stockholders on Monday that an ongoing review of costs at the coal-fired plant initially has identified at least another $160 million in cost increases.

Mississippi Power spokeswoman Amoi Geter said Southern Co. shareholders would absorb any cost increases. The parent company was hit with $540 million in charges in April, although the after-tax cost to shareholders was lower. In a January settlement with Mississippi regulators, the company agreed to shield customers from further cost increases.

The overruns could push the cost of the plant, adjoining lignite mine and associated pipelines to $4.45 billion. That’s more than $1.1 billion above original estimates.

It’s only supposed to produce 582 megawatts if ever completed. SO could have already built far more solar and wind power for that $4.45 billion, on time and on budget.

Why is Plant Ratcliffe Kemper IGCC so late and so expensive?

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Why are you gambling on nuclear instead of solar? –Gloria Tatum @ SO 2013-05-22

Why is SO gambling our health and dollars on Plant Vogtle when Georgia Power could be getting on with solar power? SO CEO Tom Fanning avoided the first part of Gloria Tatum’s question by simply denying it, and danced around the second part by saying the rate hike for Plant Vogtle’s cost overruns would only be 6 to 8 percent, not 12 percent. Do you want to pay 6 or 8 percent more for a radioactive white elephant when you could be getting power from the sun for less?

The floor person at the 22 May 2013 Southern Company Stockholder Meeting introduced Gloria Tatum with 164 shares, representing Nuclear Watch South, and the SO CEO insisted

TF: Call me Tom. Gee whiz.

Gloria Tatum GT: Tom. Hi,Tom. It’s great to be here on this beautiful day.

TF: Thank you. Yes ma’am.

GT: And I know Southern Company’s done many wonderful things, but I want to point out a few things to you today.

First, you know, after the Fukushima meltdown, TEPCO’s $50 billion nuclear complex became a worthless liability. The deadly radiation still circles the planet, polluting the earth and increasing cancer. Other countries have abandoned their nuclear and they’re looking to renewable, but Southern Company’s affiliate, Georgia Power, continues construction on two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle. Now Shell Bluff is a community down the stream from Plant Vogtle and it has experienced a 25 percent increase in cancer since Vogtle 1 and 2 have been built.

Another problem with Vogtle Continue reading →

Georgia Power wants more of your money to pay for its bad bets

It’s the annual Georgia Power rate hike, blaming everything except coal and nukes.

Georgia Power PR 28 June 2013, Georgia Power seeks cost recovery for infrastructure investments,

Georgia Power today asked the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) for permission to increase its base rates approximately $482 million, or 6.1 percent. The request is being made to allow the company to recover the costs of recent and future investments in infrastructure —including environmental controls, transmission and distribution, generation, and smart grid technologies — required in order to maintain high levels of reliability and superior customer service.

The proposed change in rates would be effective Jan. 1, 2014.

What a coincidence! One year to the month after the last rate hike. Once again blaming “smart grid technologies, environmental controls”, etc. Much more likely, this has to do with the recent downgrades of Georgia Power’s parent the Southern Company, and those were for coal and nukes. As Adam Smith said two centuries ago, “utilities levy an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow citizens”.

-jsq

Southern Company downgraded because of coal and nukes –two analysts

It’s not like they weren’t warned, about coal and about nukes. It’s not Standard & Poor’s this time, but that could happen soon, too. SO’s biggest part, Georgia Power, is neck-deep in nukes, as Edison Electric Institute’s warning about the disruptive challenge of distributed solar starts to affect its parent’s stock price.

Zacks.com wrote 21 June 2013, Southern Company Slips to Sell – Analyst Blog

On Jun 20, Zacks Investment Research downgraded electric utility firm, Southern Company ( SO ), to a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell).

Why the Downgrade?

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Sun dancing as a Georgia Trend

GSEA, GaSU, Georgia Power, and even me are quoted in a Georgia Trend feature about solar power in Georgia. As Mahatma Gandhi is alleged to have said when asked his opinion of western civilization: “that would be a good idea!”

Jerry Grillo wrote for Georgia Trend July 2013, Sun Dancing: As Georgia’s solar capacity shoots skyward, a new state utility is proposed,

It’s the sun, the sol of our solar system, to which everything that lives and moves, including the wind, owes its existence. Without the sun, there is no us, no Earth. You can’t miss it. It’s the biggest thing in the sky, the biggest thing for at least 24 trillion miles, and at 4.5 billion years old it is middle-aged and remains the most abundant source of power between here and Alpha Centauri, zapping our planet every minute with more energy than humanity can consume in a year.

The best thing is, the sun is free. Still, for most of those eons, capturing the sun’s energy for human consumption has been like picking crops with a catcher’s mitt.

But over the past few years, photovoltaic technology (“photo” for light, “voltaic” meaning electricity) has gotten way more efficient, and the previously prohibitive price has fallen dramatically, setting the stage for what’s happening now in Georgia: Solar deployment and interest are increasing dramatically.

“This is a very dynamic time for solar energy, and it demonstrates a pent-up demand and interest in solar energy for Georgia,” says Mark Bell, chair of the Georgia Solar Energy Association (GSEA) and president of Atlanta-based Empower Energy Tech-nology. “There’s a great potential here for real, sustainable economic development.”

Grillo was pretty thorough in getting a range of points of view (with the notable exception of Georgia Sierra Club), and the whole article is well worth reading.

Among the things I told Grillo back at the beginning of May, I’m especially glad he included this:

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The cloudy day doesn’t last for an entire month –John S. Quarterman @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

The disruptive challenge electric utilities face is like 1: Solar power telephone companies faced years ago, as Edison Electric Institute recently pointed out. Circuit switching 20 years ago is like distributed solar power and the smart grid it needs now; this is what I described at the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.

Hi, I’m John Quarterman, I’m from Lowndes County, down near the Florida line. These videos I’ve been taking are with Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange and you’ll find them on YouTube later.

Two things Now I’d like to commend Georgia Power for helping fund our Industrial Authority down in Lowndes County to do a strategic plan. And in the focus groups they did with that, they discovered there’s at least two things everybody wants: business, education, health care, the people in general: Continue reading →

Fukushima Floating Wind Begins

Japan’s TEPCO is deploying the offshore wind solution we need in Georgia. It’s big baseload, Georgia Power and Southern Company, just like you like!

Martin Foster write for Wind Power Monthly 25 June 2013, Work starts on Fukushima floating project: JAPAN: Installation of wind turbines in the testing phase of the biggest offshore floating project to date will finally get under way this week, 20 kilometres off the coast of Fukushima.

Two 2MW downwind floating turbines are scheduled to be towed from shipyards belonging to Mitsui Engineering and Shipbuilding in Chiba prefecture to Onahama port on 28 June, according to a new schedule released by Takeshi Ishihara a civil engineering professor at the University of Tokyo and technical adviser to the project.

These are the floating wind farms designed to survive tsunamis and typhoons. A typhoon is the Pacific Ocean version of a hurricane. How about we tether some of these to the continental shelf off the coast of Georgia? Then they plus solar onshore could replace Plants Vogtle and Hatch the same way these wind turbines plus solar inland are replacing Fukushima Dai-ichi.

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Twice French GDP and soil contamination as big as France plus Germany: the real cost of a bad French nuclear accident

Sixty hurricane Katrinas or 112 Sandys is the cost EDF, the French company that wants to build a new nuke at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, avoided revealing through “fabricated” reports that “very seriously underestimated the costs of” a potential serious nuclear accident in France. The real cost would range from 0.76 trillion to 5.8 trillion euros ($1 trillion to $7.62 trillion dollars). For comparison, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of France is about 2.11 trillion euros, according to the World Bank. So a Chernobyl- or Fukushima-style accident in France would cost ⅓ to 2¾ times French GDP. No country can afford that.

Not even the U.S., whose GDP is $14.99 trillion or $11.41 euros, so such an accident, esp. if it happened in the densely populated eastern U.S., as for example in Maryland, could cost half the GDP of the United States. That’s way beyond the $68 billion cost of Hurricane Sandy or $125 billion for Hurricane Katrina. One nuclear accident could cost more than twice the $4 to $6 trillion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.

Wolf Richter wrote for Business Insider 14 March 2013, French Nuclear Disaster Scenario Was So Bad The Government Kept It Secret,

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If missing docs sunk San Onofre, will Doosan document-forging sink Vogtle and Summer?

If documents can doom the San Onofre nuke and maybe the NRC Chair, how about forged Doosan documents and Plant Vogtle?

Matthew L. Wald wrote yesterday for The Caucus, Tussle Over Nuclear Plant Documents May Sink N.R.C. Appointment,

The botched repair job that doomed a California nuclear plant has created a political whirlpool that may be close to claiming another victim: the chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The issue is no longer the plant itself, San Onofre, which the majority owner, Southern California Edison, announced on June 7 it would permanently close. The problem now is that Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, who is chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a longtime critic of nuclear power, has been seeking documents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about Continue reading →

Ask Georgia Power to conserve our water –Garry Gentry for WWALS @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

Garry Gentry read the WWALS Watershed Coalition letter at the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.

The recent rains have swollen our blackwater rivers, Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, and Little, under our longleaf pines and Spanish-moss-covered oaks, and filled up the tea-colored tannin waters in our frog-singing pocosin cypress swamps here in central South Georgia. But that was only a dent in our protracted drought that ranges from mild to extreme, with projections not much better….

There is no need to use our Floridan Aquifer water to build more baseload power plants while Georgia lags behind Michigan, Massachusetts, and even tiny New Jersey and Maryland in solar power.

WWALS calls on the PSC to ask Georgia Power to conserve our water and to bring jobs to south Georgia through solar power and wind off the Georgia coast.

You can read the complete letter. Here’s the video:


Ask Georgia Power to conserve our water –Garry Gentry for WWALS
Georgia Power proposed closing of coal plants,
Administrative Session, GA Public Service Commission (GA PSC),
Doug Everrett (1: south Georgia), Tim Echols (2: east Georgia), Chairman Chuck Eaton (3: metro Atlanta), Stan Wise (5 north Georgia), Bubba McDonald (4: west Georgia),
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),
244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta, GA, 30334-9052, 18 June 2013.

-jsq