It’s a wallet, you perverts!
The Associated Press reports that Atlanta-based Southern Co., parent company of Georgia Power, Alabama Power, God-We-Have-So-Much Power, and other utilities, spent more than $14 million last year on lobbying the U.S. Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Energy Department and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Georgia Power, the largest subsidiary of energy juggernaut Southern Company, announced that it’s accepting proposals from wind- and solar-power providers, which the company will in turn sell to its Georgia customers. Yippee! Zero-emission energy for we!
Well, possibly. According to a Georgia Power representative, there are few providers in the state, as Georgia has historically been a region not too suitable for solar- and wind-power generation. (The company did recently find, however, that wind power would be feasible along the coast.) You’ve got until October of next year to hook those pretty pinwheels in your garden up to a battery and make our world a clean and spiffy place. And yourself a buck. Click on the link above to get the 40-page proposal.
Has Georgia Power not thought about contacting the Manns? That 45-foot-tall eco-monster of a turbine they built in Grant Park might just pay off.
Several local civic groups and activists including members of Atlanta WAND, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, Sierra Club’s Georgia Chapter, and singer Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls will rally outside the Atlanta office of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission at 2 this afternoon.
Those rallying are opposed to Southern Company’s plan to build two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle, plans that must be approved by the NRC. They point out that nuclear power is not only unsafe, but it also consumes huge quantities of water. In his Aug. 22 cover story about Southern Company’s nuclear strategy, CL’s Scott Henry noted that an expanded Plant Vogtle would consume more water each day than the entire city of Atlanta.
Here’s the press release:
A new coal-fired power plant hasn’t been built in the Peach State in decades; for the past few years, natural gas has been the energy source of choice. And now, with millions of dollars in federal incentives available, it appears nuclear energy is on the ascendancy. Georgia Power this year submitted early paperwork to expand its Plant Vogtle nuke facility.
But don’t count out the black stuff yet. Even as it’s crunching the numbers for Vogtle, our hometown energy monopoly is planning to put in a bid for a new coal plant. If coal turns out to be significantly less costly for Georgia consumers than nuclear, then coal it will be!
Georgia Power spokeswoman Carol Boatright says the company hasn’t settled on the type of plant it will propose. The options are to use new “clean coal†technology that reduces sulfur and carbon discharges — or to build a traditional, old-fashioned “pulverized coal†plant with some pollution controls.
The proposal will be delivered to the Georgia Public Service Commission, the entity responsible for regulating utilities, by Nov. 1, Boatright says.
Sierra Club lobbyist Neill Herring says he’s not surprised by the news that Georgia Power is considering another coal plant, given the company’s long history of burning the stuff. Its Plant Scherer near Macon is one of the biggest coal plants in the United States and has often been cited as the country’s single largest source for carbon dioxide emissions — the gas blamed for global warming.
If coal is selected over nuclear, then Georgia Power should be made to take advantage of the latest coal-gasification technology that screens out pollutants, says Sara Barczak, safe energy director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.
In fact, the utility would be required to adhere to current clean-air standards in any plant it builds, says PSC Chairman Bobby Baker, who adds that it’s a sensible business move for Georgia Power to cover its bases by submitting competing proposals to meet the state’s future energy needs.
The AJC, in today’s CityLife section, reprised a story CL did last month about Georgia Power’s plans to put an electrical substation in the old Pullman Yard on the edge of Kirkwood.
The AJC story says Georgia Power originally wanted to use four acres of the 28-acre site, which would have meant tearing down several of the historic buildings. But, since the land is owned by the state of Georgia, which, as CL noted, planned to sell the property, the utility could not simply condemn it and instead had to scale down its plans.
]If the land is eventually sold to a thoughtful developer who preserves the old warehouses, is it too much to hope that everybody will be happy with the outcome?
NPR reporter Nell Boyce went on a quest to find the biggest producer of greenhouse gases in the United States. It turns out the government has twisted itself in a pretzel of convoluted rules and laws that make it almost impossible to determine which companies are the big bad boys in the pollution business.
That differs from other industrial nations, such as Canada, that have a registry with the idea of creating new limits for industrial polluters.
However, Boyce did find that the most egregious offender in Canada is a coal-fired power plant in Ontario. And that if the No. 1 culprit in the United States is also a coal-burning generating plant, then we have clues about who wins the prize. An old law requires power plants to report their greenhouse emissions.
Boyce found: “[T]he EPA says that for the past three years, the company at the top of that list has been the Robert W. Scherer Power Plant near Macon, Ga.”
Georgia Power, which runs Plant Scherer, is likely so distressed at the NPR report that it’s probably busy buying a few more congressmen and senators, who will then eradicate the requirement that the company report its pollution.
