Tag Archives: Solar

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 →

Profits also link Vogtle nukes and Kemper coal

Southern Company gets substantial profits from utility customers paying in advance for “clean coal” in Kemper County, MS and for new nukes at Plant Vogtle on the Savannah River in Georgia. As long as SO can keep raking in those profits, it has incentive not to get on with distributed solar power.

Kristi E. Swartz wrote for the AJC 27 July 2011, Southern Co.’s profits up on nuke finance fees,

A fee added to Georgia Power bills to help finance a planned nuclear plant expansion also helped parent Southern Co. post an 18 percent profit gain in the second quarter.

The $3.73 monthly fee offsets financing costs for two proposed nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle.

Atlanta-based Southern cited it as one of the factors lifting net income to $603.3 million, or 71 cents a share, in the April-June quarter compared with $510.2 million, or 62 cents a share a year earlier. Profits were also helped by a hot early summer, the company said.

Back then SO CEO Tom Fanning said,

“The whole issue is to preserve schedule and costs,” Fanning said.
Continue reading →