After Airport Blackout, Georgia Utility Faces Key Nuclear-Plant Vote

Georgia Power CEO says nuclear vote and airport blackout are ‘separate issues’

As reported by Russell Gold, in the Wall Street Journal, on  Dec. 19, 2017 at 5:30 a.m. ET:

The Atlanta airport blackout could hardly have come at a worse time for Southern Co. subsidiary Georgia Power.

Days after the outage, which authorities say appears to have been caused by a fire in a piece of Georgia Power equipment, state utility regulators on Thursday are set to decide the fate of a half-finished nuclear plant the company is building that is years behind schedule and billions over budget...[the rest of the article is behind a pay wall].

Trump's Dirty Energy Bailout: Recording & Resources

This from Allison Fisher at Public Citizen:

Hi All,

Thank you for your interest in the Climate Reality Check’s December call with Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program and Casey Roberts, Senior Lawyer, Sierra Club Environmental Law Program. (See the original conference call invite, in the Update below, for bios on the speakers and an introduction to the subject matter covered on the call.)

ICYMI - You can listen to the call here:  https://fccdl.in/XQvE4g5NR

Resources and Actions:

For background on the DOE’s bailout proposal, check out David Roberts at Vox:

• https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/10/4/16407278/rick-perry-doe-plan-coal-nuclear-energy-markets
• https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/12/9/16745084/rick-perry-coal-bailout-ferc

For more on the RTO’s bailout proposal, check out this blog by Tyson Slocum: http://www.citizenvox.org/2017/12/11/trumps-biggest-threat-clean-energy/

Who will be affected by the Bailout?

RTO map:  https://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/rto.asp.  DOE's proposal would apply to PJM, ISO-NE, and NYISO.  The PJM proposal put forward in response to the FERC process would apply only in PJM

What can states do? Get your state consumer advocate to weigh in on the proposals before FERC:

CAPS: http://www.pjm-advocates.org/Home.html

What can individuals do? Sign these comments to FERC opposing the bailout: http://action.citizen.org/p/dia/action4/common/public/?action_KEY=13640

[What else can individuals do?  Sign NIRS's comments to FERC opposing the bailout:

http://org2.salsalabs.com/o/5502/t/0/blastContent.jsp?email_blast_KEY=1408141]

Let me know if you...want to get involved in efforts to stop the bailout...at afisher@citizen.org

Best,

Allison

Update on December 15, 2017 by admin

Dear Friends,

On Thursday, December 14, at 3 pm Eastern / 2 pm Central / 1 pm Mountain / 12 noon Pacific time, the Climate Reality Check team will hold the latest in our series of national conference calls to help strengthen community organizing on climate, entitled:

Bailout: how Trump is going to save coal and nuclear AND boost fracked gas.

[See recording of call, above.]

This fall, the Trump administration unveiled a radical plan to rescue failing nuclear power and coal with a massive national bailout. The plan, if implemented, would cost the public billions in higher energy bills and come at the expense of efficient and affordable wind and solar.

But Trump’s plan is just the tip of the iceberg.  A new industry scheme has emerged that would benefit natural gas plants as well.

On December 11, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is scheduled to make a decision on the proposed bailouts.

Join us on this month to hear Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program and Casey Roberts, Senior Attorney for Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program discuss:

·         the implications of FERC’s December 11 decision

·         how different bailout schemes would work

·         how much these proposals would cost consumers and what they mean for renewable energy

·         what strategies are emerging to stop them

Talk to you soon!

The CRC team* – Allison, Nancy, Jean and Ted

*The CRC team is Allison Fisher, Public Citizen; Nancy LaPlaca, Energy Consultant; Jean Su, the Center for Biological Diversity and Ted Glick, Beyond Extreme Energy and movement builder.

Have an idea or speaker for a call?  Email Allison at afisher@citizen.org

More about our presenters:

Tyson Slocum is director of Public Citizen's Energy Program, covering the regulation of petroleum, natural gas and power markets. Tyson promotes an equitable energy transition that provides distributed renewable energy generation and sustainable transportation solutions for working families. Tyson serves on the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Energy & Environmental Markets Advisory Committee, and frequently intervenes before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission representing the interests of household consumers.

Tyson presents his research in congressional testimony and appears regularly in the media, including guest appearances on The Colbert Report. Tyson is a member of the faculty at the University of Maryland Honors College, where he teaches energy and climate policy. Prior to joining Public Citizen in 2000, Tyson served as an analyst with the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy.

Casey Roberts is a Senior Attorney for Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program.  During her first few years at Sierra Club, she handled litigation involving coal-fired power plant in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Minnesota. Before she joined Sierra Club in 2011, Casey was a fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council, representing endangered fish in California rivers, and at Altshuler Berzon LLP, working on labor union, low-wage employment, and civil rights litigation.

Casey received her JD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of Ecology Law Quarterly and worked with Communities for a Better Environment and Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger.

Cover up?: Insight that would've highlighted problems with SC nuclear project scrubbed from audit two years ago

Thank you to Scott Stapf of The Hastings Group for the following Tweet:

https://twitter.com/stapf/status/933821320789405696

Cover up?: Insight that would've highlighted problems with SC nuclear project scrubbed from audit two years ago

http://www.postandcourier.com/business/insight-that-would-ve-alerted-problems-with-nuclear-project-scrubbed/article_691272a4-cf0f-11e7-a289-bf59c8d8d969.html

Update on November 24, 2017 by admin

In light of the apparent cover up, The Post and Courier article reports:

It also could cause more problems for SCANA and its executives, who are being investigated by state law enforcement officers, a federal grand jury and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

"If they would have brought this forward, they knew their investors would have gone crazy," said Rep. Russell Ott, a Democrat from St. Matthews who helped lead a special House committee that investigated the nuclear project. "This is a cover up. This is deception at its core. The bottom line is they lied to everyone and they did it intentionally."

FERC Chair Chatterjee to Push Interim ‘Lifeboat’ for Coal, Nukes

As reported by RTO Insider.

Opposition mounts to DOE Secretary Perry threat to upend U.S. wholesale energy market with nuke/coal bailout

Secretary of Energy Rick Perry’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPOR) is asking the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to indefinitely subsidize exorbitantly expensive, dangerous and dirty energy from nuclear power stations and climate-destroying coal-fired plants at a cost to the U.S. economy independent energy analysts estimate at $10.9 billion per year. On the pretense of providing reliability to the nation's electric grid system, the unprecedented subsidy would be collected from the nation’s business and residential consumers to keep antiquated and unecomocial electricity generators running. Perry’s proposed rulemaking is disingenuously offered as the only way the country can provide “resilience and diversity” to the nation’s aging electricity grid system. The Department of Energy (DOE) is pressuring the FERC to levy new energy tariffs for generators that have a 90-day fuel supply stored onsite under “to operate during an emergency, extreme weather conditions, or a natural or man-made disaster.”

Ironically, rather than provide the electrical grid with resiliency and reliability in times of natural disaster and national security threats, nuclear power stations are the most vulnerable and unreliable of electricity power generators. Extreme weather conditions that interrupt electric grid stability (earthquakes, heavy ice storms, high winds, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.) result in the reactor automatically shutting down or SCRAM. Every nuclear power station security training exercise at nuclear power stations begins with a mock attack to cut off the offsite power to reactor safety systems. Because nuclear power safety syste essentially rely upon grid power, nuclear power plants cannot be used to power up the electric grid after it goes down or "black start. The reactors also power down or SCRAM in the event of other extreme weather events affecting the “ultimate heat sink” (lakes, rivers, reservoirs) that supply reactor cooling water. At one extreme reactors must shut down when receiving water resources freeze and clog cooling water intakes become jammed with ice floes. The same is true for coal-fired generators in extremely cold temperature, coal piles freeze so hard as to make them unusable.  At the other extreme, a long drought can sufficiently lower cooling water levels and heat waves increase cooling water intake temperatures to make reactor cooling inefficient forcing reactors to significantly power down and even shut down.

In fact, the DOE proposed new tariff is aimed at compensating economically failing coal and nuclear power plants’ for their “operating and fuel expenses, costs of capital and debt, and a fair return on equity and investment.”  The FERC is expected to make a decision by December 11, 2017 on whether or not to bailout ten money losing energy companies and up to 90 U.S. power generators that otherwise have to permanently close.

A broad coalition of energy generators from practically every other sector of the U.S. energy market, from natural gas to the solar and wind power industries as well as bipartisan former FERC commissioners, and safe energy consumer groups have mobilized to strongly oppose the DOE’s proposed rulemaking. The coalitions cite that indenturing business and ratepayers to prop up failing nukes and coal-fired plants would wreak havoc on the U.S. wholesale power market, its practices and the nation’s energy future.

The Nuclear Energy Institute is supporting the bailout saying “Generation resilience and resource diversity are critical to our ability to continue providing reliable electric supply, and those attributes are not currently valued by the markets.”

However, on closer scrutiny, Perry’s DOE rulemaking didn’t bother to quantify what the bailout’s cost would be to the U.S. economy. According to expert Professor Ari Peskoe, a senior fellow in electricity law at the Harvard Law School Environmental Law Program Policy Initiative, it is an “incredibly flimsy document” that is “more like a bad term paper.” While DOE was given authority by Congress to propose rules to the FERC, something it has very rarely done, it is the FERC that must finalize the rules. In an October 30, 2017, telephone conference call, Peskoe criticized the present DOE effort as “poorly reasoned, devoid of evidence, astonishingly vague and legally deficient.” He pointed out that DOE failed to define the “resiliency” that nuclear power and coal plants would supposedly provide the grid for the FERC to base its determination. But Peskoe offered that the definition’s omission was not out of incompetence but strategic, “because if the document had defined resilience it would have been clear that fuel rods and coal piles are not the solution.” In fact, Peskoe commented, the DOE’s present pitch for  “resilience to me is a smokescreen. It's a smokescreen for a bailout” for economically failing coal plants and nuclear power stations.