The danger for the Georgia Power is that the potential for energy conservation is so great, and growing by the day, that large electrical customers may decide its cheaper to radically cut electricity use, than pay increased rates, when and if this comes online. There are also expanding options for large customers, manufacturers, schools, hospitals, to produce their own power using, for instance, small, efficient gas turbines, and combined heat and power units.
In addition, by the time this is finished, technological advances in photovoltaic solar will be creating even more options for large consumers, those with large flat roofs, parking lots, or tracts of land, to produce their own energy.
As large players opt out, rates have to rise further, and more pressure is placed on smaller residential users. They begin to use less to the degree they can. Lawyers get involved.
We’ve seen utilities go into this death spiral before, and I suspect that is what we will see play out in Georgia.
Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle nuclear expansion project will take about 19 months longer to complete than originally expected and cost about $740 million more than originally thought, the company said Thursday.
Georgia Power said its share of the estimated $14 billion project will rise to $6.85 billion, up from $6.11 billion, because of increased capital costs and additional financing costs. Customers, who have been paying the financing costs since 2011, now will pay them for a longer period of time.
Customers started paying Vogtle’s financing costs as part of a controversial nuclear fee approved by state lawmakers. The fee started at $3.88 in 2011, then rose to $4.26 the following year. Now, the fee has increased to $5.11 and will continue to climb each year until the reactors start producing electricity, which is now scheduled for the end of 2017 and 2018. At that point, the financing costs will be replaced by operating and capital, or construction, costs.
“It’s clear that some real damage could be done on the pocketbooks of ratepayers,” said Elena Parent, executive director of Georgia Watch, a consumer rights group.
Georgia Power owns 45.7 percent of Vogtle, and a group of municipal and electric utilities owns the rest. Even with the cost increases, Georgia Power executives say the project’s total cost is “still around $14 billion.”
More increases could be on the way. Delays have triggered lawsuits between the project’s main contractors and the group of utilities building Vogtle. Georgia Power’s liability in those suits totals $425 million, but the utility maintains it is not responsible for the delays or costs associated with them.
Because Georgia Power is a regulated monopoly, the utility can pass its costs onto consumers.
But nuclear power is really cheap!!!!
Big toys for big boys? Here’s a video from the Southern Companies, parent of Georgia Power showing progress through the end of 2012:
http://www.southerncompany.com/nuclearenergy/photos.aspx
IIRC, back in the 60’s or 70’s, there was a utility co. (in Louisiana, I think) that staffed up the engineering/construction team for a new nuke plant by asking the managers of existing power plants to volunteer some of their own staff.
Of course, said managers saw that as a golden opportunity to get rid of their turkeys/problem-children.
And I’ll let you guess how that all turned out 😉
I wonder what the costs would be if they had to fund the disposal of all the waste, and the cost of decommissioning the plant? They are probably getting a huge open-ended subsidy from the federal government by foisting the waste onto the tax payers?
Neil
Both decommissioning and waste disposal are costs that are integrated into the cost of the electricity generated, for all nuclear plants.
All nuclear plants maintain a monitored decommissioning fund. If the fund drops below an acceptable growth curve to allow decommissioning, the NRC required the operator to add to that fund to bring it back up to a suitable level.
Waste disposal was taken as the exclusive responsibility of the federal government in 1982, and a surcharge of 0.1c per kWh on nuclear electricity has accumulated into that fund ever since.
If we have not solved the storage issue yet, how do we know how much it will cost? We the people will be saddled with the poisonous and radioactive … stuff in the end, and we will have to pay a lot more than that fund accumulates.
It is sadly ironic that they said that nuclear power would be too cheap to meter… ha!
Neil
I think the concept of waste disposal is a fallacy. You cannot truly dispose of anything. Nature does not do disposal; it only does recycling. This is why burying nuclear waste is so irresponsible (as will be carbon sequestration). Both are forms of abdication of responsibility for the problems we have already generated. They are the environmental equivalent of chucking litter out of the window of a moving car; and will ultimately lead to us sending our waste into Space…
This is why I am in favour of FBR’s they solve most of our nuclear waste problems. In the interim, however, the UK government has only been able to make investment in nuclear power generation appeal to the private sector by retaining public liability for the waste “disposal” problem.
“Both decommissioning and waste disposal are costs that are integrated into the cost of the electricity generated, for all nuclear plants.”
I’ve ask this before. In fact I think I’ve asked it of you. No one ever answers it…
For how long? Nuclear waste management is an extremely long term proposition. So for how long are waste disposal costs integrated into the costs of the electricity generated? 10 years? 100? 1000? 10,000?
There is not a single doubt in my mind that you won’t directly answer this simple question either.
The charge for waste disposal covers the period required for the spent fuel radioactivity to reduce below that of natural minerals, and beyond. The licensing framework for Yucca Mountain required assessment out to 1 million years, although that was unnecessary because the radioactivity levels were negligible long before that.
Neil – The utilities are supposed to pay a fund for waste, but US waste has never been stored long term. Wate is leaking at Hanford, and sitting in temp storage pools at the power plants where it presents a very real danger of overheating and burning. Everyone thought the danger was the reactor core and containment building, but now we know the spent storage pool is probably even more of a hazard. yes, the utilities, banks, and bondholders are getting a good deal. The ratepayers are getting a raw deal. The utility can raise the rates before the power plant produces electricity. The financial groups get a loan guarantee. And all of them get a break on liability insurance, since they are not required to carry any. If the power plants become Fukushima, its not like BP paying for the Gulf. They are off the hook entirely. Insurance statements had clauses that used to say they are not liable in the event of war, acts of God, or nuclear accidents. Even with all of that, most private investment will not underwrite a nuclear construction. Why? A miserable record of cost over runs, cancelled construction, and a high rate of unexpected long term outages. This is not just past power plants, this is right now. Witness San Onofre(shut down), Olkuliuto(cost over runs), Vogtle(cost over runs). This is what nuke cheerleaders call a renaissance.
Hanford waste is from nuclear weapons production, not nuclear power.
Spent fuel pools at nuclear power plants actually present very little danger. The mistaken panic over this at Fukushima – and subsequent actual data that showed there was no danger – should be a lesson to everyone, but I somehow doubt that those emotionally opposed to nuclear power will be able to give it up so easily.
Nuclear power plants carry liability, not only for their own plants, but also for the whole industry. They are never off the hook; simply that Congress must decide how to fund liability if it gets above 11 billion dollars, which in itself is a huge amount unlikely to be reached as a direct consequence of radiological problems at a US power plant.
Insurance companies are specifically restrained from scamming the public by offering independent insurance on nuclear accidents, because scaring people into paying useless premiums is unethical.
Re: “The mistaken panic over this at Fukushima – and subsequent actual data that showed there was no danger – should be a lesson to everyone,”
WTF are you talking about? Two of the containments at Fukushima blew up in massive explosions. Only heroic efforts kept them from becoming so devastating that Tokyo (30 million people) would have been forced to be evacuated.
Which lunatic bin have you escaped from?
At the risk of re-opening an old wound, Peter, I am an only “pro-nuclear” in the sense that I do not see how renewables (with their extremely low energy conversion efficiency and energy density) will ever be able to enable 10 billion people to live like we do in the West. However, this may never happen, in which case investing in nuclear power would be a colossal waste of money.
I would like to believe, like you I think, that reasonably low-tech solutions such as “gravity lights” could be made available to people in the World’s poorest countries and that their technological dependence on the West could thereby be eliminated.
In this respect, nuclear power is like genetically modified organisms (GMOs) – it is likely to perpetuate such dependency and, far from benefiting poor people, will just make rich people even richer. This is the locus of my opposition to both nuclear power and GMOs – it is ethical not ideological.
Therefore, rather than trying to scare people into opposing these things, Greenpeace – and all other environmental groups – would do well to emphasise the ethical arguments against both nuclear power and GMOs.
We can gather far more energy than we could possibly need from renewable energy – like sixteen times more. Yes renewable energy is dispersed all over the earth, and that is a good thing. Nobody can control it, and nobody has to be beholden to anybody else to get access to it.
No pollution, and renewable energy will be here as long as the earth exists – about another Billion years.
Neil
I am with you in spirit, Neil. However, the reality of distributed micro-generation (or whatever) will still require the consumption of vast amounts of finite resources and, playing directly into the hands of NIMBYs everywhere, the use (or dual use) of vast amounts of land. I am not against this; I am just being realistic about the anachronistic and ideological opposition we face.
How far can we reduce usage and consumption without sacrificing quality of life or devoting considerably more time to the daily necessities.
Re: “This is the locus of my opposition to both nuclear power and GMOs – it is ethical not ideological.”
You’ve got ethics? We’ve found the cure for polio. Is there any hope we can find the cure for ethics?
Wow, this is a first. 😉
In all seriousness, nuclear has been priced out of the market for a long time (even ignoring the waste costs they don’t deal with). And when’s the last time you saw someone develop a nuclear power plant without massive government subsidy?
I know you know, just rambling….
Re: “And when’s the last time you saw someone develop a nuclear power plant without massive government subsidy?”
The Navy does it all the time when they commission a new attack sub to take out the Soviet Union or an Aircraft Carrier to shoot some camel herders in Yemen.
They don’t get a subsidy. They get a free ride out of the dummkopf taxpayer’s hide.
Subsidies are for amateurs. If you really want to rape the American public, go MILITARY!
“The danger for the Georgia Power is that the potential for energy conservation is so great, and growing by the day, that large electrical customers may decide its cheaper to radically cut electricity use, than pay increased rates, when and if this comes online. There are also expanding options for large customers, manufacturers, schools, hospitals, to produce their own power using, for instance, small, efficient gas turbines, and combined heat and power units.”
There is no special reason to expect rates to rise once this plant starts operating.
I fail to see how – from a climate point of view – facilities for producing power from small gas turbines is a preferable sitaution to producing carbon-free nuclear power. Small turbine for dedicated users will not be efficient in a thermodynamic sense, although with an artificial depressed (and unburdened) gas price, they make make economic sense for a while. Still they will lock in a lot of fossil fuel burning,which should be reason for alarm rather than satisfaction.
Nuclear power is not carbon free – far from it. Enriched uranium fuel rods and large concrete and steel plants don’t appear out of thin air, and long term storage requires lots of pumped water, and more construction and transportation costs, and decommissioning ain’t easy either.
So, let’s not deceive ourselves, okay?
Neil
I think it’s fair to say that anyone against wind power is anti-climate, and anyone against solar power is anti-climate. And I’m sorry, Peter, but anyone against nuclear power is also anti-climate.
In the year following Fukushima (a disaster that killed zero), Japan’s CO2 emissions from electrical generation rose 17%, because of the loss of nuclear power. Germany, which is beginning to follow suit, has also seen their CO2 emissions rise because of the loss of nuclear power. While human civilization is on the brink, we’re sitting here arguing about the color of the lifeboats. Even worse, we’re deliberately sinking some of those few lifeboats we have. I would submit, Mr. Lack, that is the very definition of unethical.
Yes, we all know it takes a lot of money to build a nuclear plant. But (a) the nuclear plant is engineered for 40 a year lifespan (has to, or it won’t get a license) while the wind farm last is engineered for a 20 year lifespan (according to the NREL); and (b) the wind farm has a mean availability rate of 29%, while the nuclear plant is about three times that. Do the math yourself with just those two factors and you’ll find that nuclear is cheaper in the long haul.
And nuclear waste isn’t waste if we do the only sensible thing and use it as a source of carbon-free energy, as Transatomic (and Terrestrial Energy, and Flibe Energy) want to do. Let’s get out of the way and let them do it.
There are more renewable energy sources than just solar PV and wind. There is wave power, and tidal power and geothermal and biomass and solar heat, too. There is small scale hydro, and biofuels from algae and the like.
Neil
And we should do all those things. And we should do nuclear.
To clarify: I don’t hear anybody saying we shouldn’t do solar, or wind, or geothermal, because “it’s too expensive.” I hear that argument for nuclear all the time, and it’s just rubbish. Solar Thermal may be the most expensive energy generation method ever invented, but I’ve never heard anyone (at least, not on the left) complain about its cost.
You can’t know the true total cost of something if you don’t factor in the externalities (how I hate that word!).
Do that for all power generation methods and then we’ll talk about which is more expensive.
There is a difference between expensive and too expensive.
200 billion cleanup costs and lost land area and lives affected in just one accident that was even lucky (could have been much worse if the wind blew over Tokyo!) is what is called too expensive. Smaller economies could bankrupt over such an event. An energy source that potentially bankrupts an economy and destroys useful land and infrastructure forever is ‘too expensive’.
These risks aren’t included in the price of electricity from nuclear power plants (and would destroy it’s economics many times over).
Hey kap55, I’m not sure why you mention me, I’m about the only other person here willing to admit that nuclear power is probably necessary. Like you, I don’t want nuclear dismissed for ideological reasons; and I would be happy to embrace it if it can be shown to be egalitarian (as opposed to elitist).
Hi Martin,
Let me add my name to the roles of the willing on nuclear power.
I’m of two minds. Nuke plants make fabulous tea kettles, but the downside is the mismanagement of the industry. The waste issue shouldn’t exist. And the honesty of the management is atrociously MIA.
But as a technology, nuclear power is a pretty neat trick,
And on the atmospheric CO2 front it is pure genius.
Author and nuclear expert Richard Rhodes wrote an intelligent essay advocating nuclear power in Foreign Affairs Magazine in 2000:
http://www.nci.org/conf/rhodes/index.htm
I found his arguments compelling. Though I do believe he was not critical enough of the arrogance and dishonesty of nuclear industry management.
Thanks Ray. Richard Rhodes sounds like he may well have influenced Tom Blees to write Prescription for the Planet, who/which heavily influenced James Hansen’s opinions regarding nuclear power:
http://www.prescriptionfortheplanet.com/
Your Saturday Cartoon on why America’s energy policy is so screwed up:
http://www.occupybendor.org/news.php?1712