Tag Archives: Renewable Energy

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,

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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.

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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,

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Video of Southern Company shareholders meeting @ SO 2013-05-22

Here’s Southern Company’s own video of the 22 May 2013 shareholders meeting. More detail will follow on the record number of questions, and CEO Tom Fanning’s answers, in addition to this one already posted.

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UK biomass plant exploded from Waycross wood pellets

Explosions in Tilbury, England, explosions in Waycross: south Georgia wood pellet dust blowing up here and there and producing CO2 when burned there. Why is “the world’s largest wood pellet plant” a better use of Georgia foresters’ resources than solar farms, which don’t pollute and don’t explode?

Josh Schlossberg wrote for The Biomass Monitor 24 May 2013, Biomass Industry Plays With Fire, Gets Burned,

A massive fire raged inside wood pellet silos for RWE’s Tilbury Power Station in Essex, UK, on February 27, 2012. The biomass incinerator—the largest in the world at 750 megawatts—had just been converted from coal to woody biomass a month earlier. RWE claims no single cause can be attributed to the fire, but suspects that smoldering wood pellets triggered the dust fire.

In a recent editorial (apparently not online), Robert Farris Executive Director of the Georgia Forestry Commission, wrote that Georgia has nine wood pellet plants. He didn’t name them, but Biomass Magazine has a list of U.S. wood pellet plants, including these in Georgia (I added the City column): Continue reading →

Nuclear reactor percent power from NRC data

Do nuclear reactors really deliver dependable baseload capacity? I hear industry execs say 99.99% uptime. The real average from seven years of NRC data for 104 reactors is 88.13%.

Vogtle 1 According to Power Reactor Status Reports posted online by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, here are the actual percent power percentages over time for the 104 listed nuclear power reactors. The timeframe is 31 March 2006 through today, 21 May 2013. (The NRC data appears to go back to 1999, but seven years is a good sample to start with.) The computation for each reactor is the sum of the uptime percentages for each day divided by the number of days. The total uptime is the sum of the reactor uptimes divided by the number of reactors. Here’s the list, sorted two ways:

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Content in today’s Industrial Authority agenda! @ VLCIA 2013-05-21

Names of projects! Lists of PR and marketing items! Is this a new trend from our Industrial Authority? Or will it be like the last time I complimented them on an agenda with content and was told later that one was an accident.

Here’s the agenda. Sure, the project names are codewords, but that’s how they talk to prospective companies without revealing all their cards to the competition. And this one has a name:

Maybe we’ll hear more about those two megawatts of solar power. Maybe even more are scheduled for Lowndes County.

Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority
Agenda, Tuesday, May 21, 2013 5:30 p.m.
Industrial Authority Conference Room
2110 N. Patterson Street
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Solar Fedex in Buffalo

How many of the distribution centers here have solar panels on top? Or schools? Or government buildings? Or businesses? None. But sunny far-north-next-to-Canada Buffalo has them.

David Robinson wrote for Buffalo News 14 May 2013, FedEx groundbreaking gives region bragging rights: FedEx Trade Networks breaks ground on a new distribution center that development officials hope will lure more companies, jobs

FedEx Trade Networks began construction Tuesday on its new distribution center in the Town of Tonawanda, giving hope to local development officials that the company’s expansion will boost the Buffalo Niagara region’s efforts to become a distribution and logistics hub.

“It really drives home the value of this region as a center for logistics in the global economy,” said Kenneth Adams, president and chief executive officer of Empire State Development, the state’s main economic development agency.

“It plays to the inherent strength of the region,” Adams said. “There could be no better seal of approval for a logistics business in this location.”

We’ve got transportation and logistics and distribution centers here, but we don’t have this:

Fred Schardt, president of FedEx Trade Networks, said the environmental benefits of the company’s 14-acre site within the Riverview Solar Technology Park off River Road also were a selling point. “We understand the importance of doing business in an environmentally sustainable way. It’s very, very important for us,” he said. “This park allows this to happen.”

The FedEx building will include a 100-kilowatt solar array that will be integrated into the design of the structure. Those solar panels are expected to generate 1 million kilowatt-hours of electricity during the term of the company’s lease, reducing the company’s consumption of fossil fuels by the equivalent of 80,000 gallons of gasoline, Montante said.

If Buffalo, a thousand miles to the north with much less sun, can do this, we can, too. Maybe if we did this, maybe in some of VLCIA’s industrial parks, maybe it would attract more businesses….

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Georgia missing out on solar jobs behind New Jersey and Michigan

Other states, even New Jersey and far-north Michigan, are beating Georgia to solar jobs. Why isn’t sunny Georgia leading in one of the fastest-growing industries in the country that is deploying rural jobs everywhere else? Hint: who’s holding a shareholder meeting this month?

Carin Hall wrote for energydigital 13 May 2013, Solar Jobs Outnumber Texas Ranchers and US Coal Miners: New statistics show that solar is one of the fastest growing industries in the US, creating thousands of jobs across the country

There are now more solar energy workers in the state of Texas than there are ranchers, according to solar research group The Solar Foundation.

The group’s data mapping out solar jobs across the nation also showed that there are more solar jobs in California than actors, and more solar workers than coal miners nationwide. Sunny states like California and Arizona topped the list. Wyoming came in last, with just 50 workers, while Utah showed a mere 290 solar workers despite being one of the country’s sunniest states.

Even the states with less sunshine like New Jersey and Michigan showed a high number of solar jobs—thanks to favorable tax and regulatory policies that help attract developers to cope with high electricity prices.

New Jersey is #9 and Michigan is #15 according to The Solar Foundation’s map of State Solar Jobs. Where’s Georgia? Number 41 in solar jobs per capita. Yet Michigan is #47 by maximum solar resource and New Jersey is #36, while Georgia is #18: much sunnier than those northern states. Why is Georgia so far behind?

LEGAL STATUS OF THIRD-PARTY OWNERSHIP: NOT ALLOWED

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Dear SO: Time to move beyond coal –Sierra Club

You can to talk to Southern Company even if you can’t come to SO’s annual stockholder meeting 22 May at Callaway Gardens. Sierra Club helps you to ask SO CEO Thomas A. Fanning questions; maybe about SO’s nuclear financial and safety performance, or why SO is already losing on its “clean coal” bet in Mississippi, or when SO might get serious about distributed solar power, or when SO will help Georgia join the Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy Consortium, or…. So many possible questions, and you don’t even have to go to ask them!

Sierra Club message to Southern Company, Tell Southern Company to Move Beyond Coal,

On May 22, Southern Company will host its annual shareholder meeting in Georgia, giving us a great opportunity to push them forward on clean energy.

Southern Company has taken steps to grow clean energy in the Southeast — Alabama Power and Georgia Power both invested in wind energy and Georgia power increased solar energy investments — but they can do a lot more.

Southern Company still provides some of the dirtiest, most unreliable, dangerous, and expensive power in the country. And its subsidiaries continue to place “Big Bets” on dirty coal electricity that poisons the health of our communities’ water, air, and families. Georgia is even home to the biggest emitter of carbon pollution in the nation, Scherer Plant in Juliette.

Send a message to Southern Company’s CEO Tom Fanning to thanking him for clean energy investments, and demand that Southern Company clean up its act and invest in job creating clean energy.

Follow the link to send a message.

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