Tag Archives: Wind

Southern Company Stockholder Meeting @ SO 2013-05-22

Spring means soon time for the Southern Company Stockholder meeting! See what one of the biggest electric utilities in the world is up to, and maybe make a few suggestions.

Here are videos of what you missed last year, and here is the official SO notice for this year (I got a link to it because I’m a shareholder): Notice of Annual Meeting of Stockholders of The Southern Company

DATE: Wednesday, May 22, 2013
TIME: 10:00 a.m., ET
PLACE: The Lodge Conference Center at Callaway Gardens
Highway 18
Pine Mountain, Georgia 3182

It includes a list of Items of Business, which doesn’t mention that stockholders are usually allowed to ask questions. Those questions are usually answered by Thomas A. fanning, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, who included a letter (text below) in which he recites his usual list of energy sources, in his usual order: Continue reading →

Electric utiltiies know about Moore’s Law for solar power

And they know compound annual growth, even at a low 22% rate, is going to cause them a heap of trouble.

More from the Edison Electric Institute January 2013 report, Disruptive Challenges: Financial Implications and Strategic Responses to a Changing Retail Electric Business (rehosted on the LAKE web server, since it disappered from the EEI server),

The decline in the price of PV panels from $3.80/watt in 2008 to $0.86/watt in mid-20121. While some will question the sustainability of cost-curve trends experienced, it is expected that PV panel costs will not increase (or not increase meaningfully) even as the current supply glut is resolved. As a result, the all-in cost of PV solar installation approximates $5/watt, with expectations of the cost declining further as scale is realized;

Sure, costs won’t continue to drop forever, but Continue reading →

Solar could burn utility business model

Exhibit 2 Utilities say that like it’s a bad thing. The same utilities that left millions without power in the U.S. repeatedly last year, and that gouge ratepayers for 10% or more profits. Moore’s Law continues to drive solar costs down and installations up, with increasingly more each like compound interest. Utilties need to adapt or get out of the way.

Last November Moody’s reported that solar and wind were eroding credit for coal and gas power plants, and were already having ‘a profound negative impact’ on the competitiveness of thermal generation companies. That was in Europe. David Roberts wrote for Grist yesterday, Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities,

The thing to remember is that it is in a utility’s financial interest to generate (or buy) and deliver as much power as possible. The higher the demand, the higher the investments, the higher the utility shareholder profits. In short, all things being equal, utilities want to sell more power. (All things are occasionally not equal, but we’ll leave those complications aside for now.)

And they want to produce that power from big baseload power stations for their economy of scale while the monopoly power utilities get guaranteed profits, not to mention huge ratepayer and loan-guaranteed boondoggles like the new nukes at Plant Vogtle. (Electric Member Cooperatives are somewhat different.)

Now, into this cozy business model enters cheap distributed solar PV, which eats away at it like acid.

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Fossil fuels get five times the subsidies of renewable solar and wind

Fossil fuels get more than $70 billion dollars a year in U.S. government subsidies (tax breaks and direct spending), while solar and wind get only about $12 billion, so fossil fuels got more than five times as much, while nuclear got ten times as much (especially in Georgia). Even corn ethanol, that sounded-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time boondoggle, gets more subsidies than solar and wind put together.

That’s without even going into the externalities such as healthcare costs due to polution, environmental destruction through mountaintop removal for coal, tar sands oil drilling, and fracking for natural gas, and wars for oil and uranium.

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Arkansas tar sands oil spill

Will Exxon clean all these tar sands oil spills like BP “cleaned up” the Gulf? Meanwhile, a solar spill is called a nice day.

June 2013, pipeline ruptured in Alberta: 250,000 gallons spilled into the Red Deer River.

27 March 2013, train derailment in Minnesota: 15,000 gallons spilled.

“Only about 1,000 gallons has been recovered,” said Dan Olson, spokesman for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. “The remaining oil on the ground has thickened into a heavy tar-like consistency.”

30 March 2013, pipleline rupture, Mayflower, Arkansas: “thousands of gallons” spilled.

Kimberly Brasington, an Exxon spokeswoman, confirmed the oil from the ruptured Pegasus pipeline originated in Canada. The oil is “Wabasca Heavy Crude from Western Canada,” she said in an e-mail Sunday. Canadian group CrudeMonitor describes Wabasca as a blend of heavy oil production from the Athabasca region.

Aerial footage of the Arkansas crude seeping through woods, waterways, streets, and yards:

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Billions for Cape Wind

Wind, wind, blow away the NIMBYs.

David Richardson wrote for Grist today, Cape Wind wins billions in backing, launches offshore wind in the U.S.

What do you do when local opposition to an offshore wind farm project dries up, when the NIMBY crowd runs out of steam, when the federal government gives the green light and extends every permit and courtesy the law will allow, when the technology is tested and proven, and there’s nothing left to do but build it? Well, then you go looking for money — lots of it. After more than a decade of preparation, the Massachusetts wind energy company Cape Wind has done just that — and the results are looking promising.

A $2 billion agreement with Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ penned last week catapults Cape Wind to a commanding lead in the race to be the first offshore wind project in the U.S. When complete, 130 turbines in Nantucket Sound will generate 468 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 100,000 to 200,000 households in the Cape Cod region, depending on the season. If the company can get construction started this year, Cape Wind’s clean power could begin turning on lights from Buzzards Bay to Provincetown by 2015.

There’s more in the article.

-jsq

Apple: from 35% to 75% renewable energy in two years

All it takes is the will to get it done, and Apple is doing it: from 35% renewable energy in 2010 to 75% in 2012, and 100% at all Apple data centers. Cost? They’ll save more than they spent. Time for Georgia Power and Southern Company to stop dragging their feet and help us get on with it in Georgia.

Peter Burrows wrote for Bloomberg Thursday that Apple got nudged:

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Renewable Portfolio Standards: GA, NC, and ALEC

Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards (RPS) are being proposed in Georgia and ALEC is trying to do away with them in North Carolina. If ALEC doesn’t like them, there must be something good about RPS. Let’s get on with real renewable energy in Georgia.

In Georgia, HB 503, sponsored by Karla Drenner, Carol Fullerton, Debbie Buckner, Scott Holcomb, Spencer Frye, and Earnest Smith, would create a Renewable Energy Credits Trading program as part of renewable portfolio standards, as Kyle wrote for Spencer Frye’s blog 10 March 2013, Let the Sunshine In. Unfortunately, HB 503 includes biomass as a renewable energy source. Maybe they just mean landfill gas, which I consider a special case since it’s being produced anyway, and since methane is worse as a greenhouse gas than CO2, burning landfill gas makes some sense. Nope, in the actual bill, 46-3-71 (1):

‘Biomass material’ means organic matter, excluding fossil fuels and black liquor, including agricultural crops, plants, trees, wood, wood wastes and residues, sawmill waste, sawdust, wood chips, bark chips, and forest thinning, harvesting, or clearing residues; wood waste from pallets or other wood demolition debris; peanut shells; cotton plants; corn stalks; and plant matter, including aquatic plants, grasses, stalks, vegetation, and residues, including hulls, shells, or cellulose containing fibers

The barn door in there is “harvesting”, which can mean whole trees, but the rest isn’t much better. We don’t need to be burning things that increase atmospheric CO2 and end up stripping our forests. In North Carolina they staretd with just tops and limbs and then tried to escalate to whole trees. We already fought off the biomass boondoggle here in south Georgia; let’s not have it encouraged statewide. Especially when we have better solutions: solar and wind power. HB 503 isn’t going to get passed this year, since it didn’t make crossover day, so maybe its sponsors can clean up that biomass mess before they submit it again.

Speaking of North Carolina, Continue reading →

Fukushima still broken 2 years after

Tomorrow is the second anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that heavily damaged four of the six nuclear reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi in Japan on 11 March 2011, also known as 3/11. The broken reactors at Fukushima continue to leak radioactive substances into groundwater, the sea, and the air, where it is carried across oceans to the U.S. and elsewhere. And it could still get much worse: if the No. 4 reactor pool, still suspended in the air, collapses and causes the disintegration of spent fuel rods from all the other reactors there, Tokyo, 200 miles away, will have to be evacuated. Fukushima’s GE reactors are the same GE Mark I design as Southern Company’s Plant Hatch 1 and 2 only 100 miles from here at Baxley, GA, and about 200 miles from Atlanta and Charleston. Hatch is leaking radioactive tritium into our groundwater again. Five more reactors within 500 miles of here are also GE Mark I.

Among the 311 or so facebook pages and websites about Fukushima or against nuclear power is this concise one, Unplug Nuclear Power, which offers a simple action anyone can take tomorrow:

On 3/11, we will mark Fukushima day by using as little utility supplied electricity as possible. This direct Action is designed to punish the utility companies for continuing to push for nuclear power even after the Fukushima disaster has proven that it is just too dangerous. On that day, we will punish them in the only way that they understand, by denying them our money. There will be four levels of participation, go to the website, www.unplugnuclearpower.com for a more complete description. Also, be sure to join the Event. Finally, if you are in a group our organization that can endorse this Action, please let us know.

As Jeremy Rifkin so concisely spelled out, nuclear power is over Continue reading →

Scorecard on Internet and Energy at the Bird Supper

Gretchen Quarterman, Dexter Sharper, Bill Slaughter, and others at the Bird Supper in Atlanta

On the 27th of February I posted Internet and Energy at the Bird Supper and Gretchen and I went to the Bird Supper in Atlanta and discussed those four bills with legislators. Our local elected officials were lobbying on the same side of many of the same bills. It’s past crossover day now, when bills are supposed to be approved by one house of the Georgia legislature in order to be taken up by the other. How did that come out? We all beat the mighty telcos and cablecos on two bills! But Georgia Power is even mightier, and won on two bills. Plus one legislator’s name is connected with 3 out of 4 of those bills. And our local delegation cancelled itself out on the one vote that actually went to the floor.

Internet Access: help stop two telecommunications bills

The local Industrial Authority, Chamber of Commerce, Valdosta City Council, and Lowndes County Commission have recently realized that fast Internet access is essential to attract businesses, for their employees to work at home, for applicants to apply for jobs, for students to submit assignments, and for general quality of life. And there’s good news from the legislature!

Continue reading →