Tag Archives: Southern Company

Southern Company missed earnings: weather and Kemper Coal and nuclear Plant Vogtle

SO CEO Tom Fanning continued to blame slow sales and earnings on mild weather (air conditioners running less), but the big boondoggle going bad is Kemper Coal, which has slipped six months from May 2014 to Q4 2014, and even the Wall Street Journal calls it “possibly the most expensive fossil-fuel power plant ever built in the U.S”. How bad will SO’s stock tank when SO’s even more expensive nuclear Plant Vogtle slips even more? Dividends can’t prop up SO’s share price forever, not when PSCs are revolting against the rate hikes and guaranteed profit hikes that prop up those dividends. When will Southern Company and Georgia Power get out front and lead in solar and wind power? Before or after the public, state public service commissions, and investors make them do it?

Justin Loiseau wrote for DailyFinance 4 November 2013, Southern Company Earnings: A $5 Billion Blunder? Continue reading →

Citizens for solar power; GA leg. not so much

Utility backers in the Georgia legislature tried scare tactics to stop HB 657 (or anything else) from requiring more solar power from Georgia Power. Still no solar tax, said citizens in Savannah, Columbus, Gainesville, Athens, and now Atlanta.

Walter C. Jones wrote for the Florida Times-Union 31 October 2013, Outlook for solar bill isn’t bright in Georgia. Not sure why this picture of me illustrates this story on facebook (I wasn’t at the hearing in Atlanta), but hey, why not.

Claudia Collier with Green Georgia drove from Savannah to speak at the hearing.

“This bill will give us direct choice in where our electricity comes from,” she said.

Rep. Mike Dudgeon, R-Johns Creek, pointed to the amount of solar generation the Public Service Commission ordered Georgia Power to acquire this year.

“It looks like the PSC is already managing the situation,” he said.

As Southern Company CEO Tom Fanning and Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers well know, Continue reading →

No solar tax –citizens in Gainesville GA

Solar advocate PSC Commissioner Bubba McDonald joined Tim Echols for this one. Citizens said no to Georgia Power’s proposed solar tax, just like in Savannah and Columbus.

Sarah Mueller wrote yesterday for Gainesville Times, Public gives thumbs-down to Georgia Power rate hike,

The Georgia Power Co. rate hike proposal and suggested fees on solar energy installation didn’t get a lot of support from residents who attended a town meeting in Gainesville on Tuesday night.

The Georgia Public Service Commission is reviewing a $482 million three-year rate increase request from the energy company that would add about $7.84 to the average ratepayer’s monthly bill. The Georgia Sierra Club and Georgia Watch has sponsored town meetings around the state this month to let commissioners hear public input on the request. Commissioners Tim Echols and Lauren “Bubba” McDonald participated in the meeting at the Brenau Downtown Center.

Pursuing solar energy as state policy was also a hot topic at the meeting, which was lightly attended. About 10 people spoke, criticizing the proposed hike, the company’s proposed guaranteed profit increase to 11.5 percent and Continue reading →

NRC back up: many nukes down

Newly down nukes Now that the NRC is back up, we can see all the nukes that went down during the government shutdown: nine of them. If they’re not safe to run without NRC looking over their shoulder, are they safe to run at all? And two came back up. Was that a prudent thing to do? Meanwhile, solar panels don’t need an NRC.

Entergy’s chronically faulty Pilgrim 1 was the last to fall during the shutdown, while Southern’s defect-shipped Farley 1 was one of the first:

Newly down nukes

Continue reading →

Many safety violations at Georgia nukes, and NRC is shut down

Georgia’s two nuclear sites got more than a safety violation a month over a dozen years, and now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is shut down. Maybe we need power sources that don’t need so much safety inspection, like solar and wind and efficiency and conservation.

AP wrote yesterday, 166 violations issued at Ga. nuclear power plants,

A congressional study expected to be released later this month shows that two nuclear power plants in Georgia were issued 166 safety violations between 2000 and 2012.

The unreleased Government Accountability Office report obtained by the Associated Press shows that Plant Hatch in Baxley was issued 90 safety violations during the time period. According to the report, three of the violations were higher-level offenses.

According to the report, Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro was also issued 75 safety violations between 2000 and 2012.

Allison Macfarlane wrote on the NRC blog 9 October 2013, From the Chairman: An Update on the NRC Shutdown, Continue reading →

Fourth extension on Vogtle nuclear loan guarantee deadline

Southern Company doesn’t want to pay $17 to $52 million to get an $8.33 billion federal loan guarantee. That’s 0.2% to 0.62%. Why should we guarantee SO’s bad bet for pennies down? Let’s just call it off!

Ray Henry wrote for AP yesterday, Talks continue over Ga. nuclear plant loans,

Three years after the U.S. government promised $8.3 billion in lending for a nuclear plant in Georgia, Southern Co. and its partners have not sealed a deal.

President Barack Obama’s administration recently agreed to a fourth extension of the deadline for finalizing lending agreements between Southern Co. subsidiary Georgia Power and the other owners of the nuclear plant now under construction. Congress authorized the funding in 2005 to revive a nuclear industry that at the time expected growth.

Few utilities secured even a preliminary agreement, mostly because power companies dropped plans to build nuclear plants. The Great Recession trimmed the demand for energy, and plummeting natural gas prices made it cheaper to build gas-fired plants. The slumping economy also pushed interest rates to historic lows, reducing borrowing costs and undercutting the need for subsidized lending.

All that and ten nukes have been closed or cancelled in the past year. Even France’s EDF has exited nukes in the U.S. and has already built more U.S. solar and wind power than SO’s new Plant Vogtle nukes would produce.

Southern Company now claims this federal loan guarantee isn’t necessary: Continue reading →

European utilities scared of renewable energy

Another reason Southern Company needs to get on with a smart grid, using its biggest private R&D outfit in the U.S. Now that solar has reached grid parity with everything including natural gas (and years since it passed nuclear), if the utilities don’t get out in front, they’re going to be left behind.

Derek Mead wrote for Motherboard yesterday, European Utilities Say They Can’t Make Money Because There’s Too Much Renewable Energy,

Renewable energy has been on a tear the past few years, with growth in many countries spurred by subsidies for wind and solar power. Now the heads of 10 European utility companies say EU subsidies should end, because they've got more renewable energy than they know what to do with.

The 10 CEOs in question, who refer to themselves as the Magritte group because they first met in an art gallery, represent companies that control about half the power capacity of Europe. The group gave a press conference today— Reuters says that 10 such executives giving a joint public statement is “unprecedented”—to hammer home a message they’ve been trumpeting ahead of an EU energy summit in 2014: There’s too much energy capacity, which has driven prices down so far that they can’t make any money.

As long as there are nukes or coal plants, there’s too much capacity. European utilities need to get on with things like Continue reading →

How fast industries can change: mobile phones and solar power

In only half a dozen years Microsoft went from laughing at the iPhone to admitting MS had none of the mobile phone or mobile device market, while Apple became the most valuable company in the world. Another entrenched industry, electric power will also change radically in only a few years, and solar power will win like the Internet did.

MG Siegler of Google Ventures blogged this on ParisLemon 20 September 2013, What A Difference Six Years Makes…

Steve Ballmer, 2007:

Steve Ballmer

Right now we’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones a year.

Steve Ballmer, a few months later:

It’s sort of a funny question. Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody.

Now we’ll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.

Steve Ballmer, yesterday:

Mobile devices. We have almost no share.

And it wasn’t just Steve Jobs riding Moore’s Law on an iPhone: Continue reading →

Which first to get more solar: fight big money or new technology?

In Georgia we’re still below 1% electric power generation from solar, and we can get to 20-30% with no new technology whatever. Georgia Power’s nuke overruns are already causing a reaction of still more distributed solar. Yet even that good news gets the usual reaction: “This is necessary but not sufficient: a breakthrough in energy storage technology is required.” Which just ain’t so; distributed rooftop solar alone is plenty to move Georgia way ahead. That’s why Edison Electric Institute calls distributed solar a massively disruptive influence on the utilities’ century-old cozy baseload model. What’s holding solar back is those same big utilities, who understandably don’t want to change their long-time cash cow. But they’re going to change, and pretty quickly.

People unfamiliar with the sunny south (which is most of the world south of, oh, Germany), still say things like this: Continue reading →

Nuke overruns already causing distributed solar in south Georgia

People are tired of irresponsible trash government at the state level colluding with monopoly utilities to hold Georgia back in distributed solar power, and some of us are doing something about it; you can, too.

Jigar Shah wrote for SaportReport 15 September 2013 Solar more viable as Georgia’s new nuclear power plants face overruns,

I am seeing Georgia’s nuclear financial woes starting to prompt a boon for distributed energy including solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, low-impact hydro, high efficiency cogeneration, and other sources of electricity.

Biomass? Let’s not go back to that carbon-polluting forest-destroying factory-exploding waste of time and resources. Solar, wind, efficiency, and conservation are the main events, with solar increasingly leading the pack. And those nuke cost overruns are already driving solar up even faster: Continue reading →