Tag: Power Plants

There Is Always A Scheme

The other day I got a letter from my power company……I had to read it a couple of times because I thought I was missing something…….

Gulfport, Miss. – Mississippi Power today filed with the Mississippi Public Service Commission for recovery of financing costs associated with constructing the Kemper County energy facility, which will be used to mitigate and stabilize future rate increases. The filing was made in accordance with the settlement agreement reached on Thursday with the PSC for regulatory procedures related to the Kemper project.

The company has requested to recover $172 million, representing a 21 percent adjustment on total retail revenues. If approved, the typical residential customer using 1,000 kWh a month will see an increase of less than a $1 a day on bills in 2013.  (that is $30 increase a month or $360 a year)

“We have worked hard to keep this increase as low as possible,” said Mississippi Power President and CEO Ed Day.

Working with the PSC on the procedures outlined in the settlement agreement and the Mississippi Legislature on legislation allowing alternate financing of a portion of the project, the company anticipates the overall average rate effect of the Kemper project will be approximately 25 percent.

“This is well under the increase we had anticipated and significantly lower than what opponents to the project claimed,” said Day.

It has been more than three decades since Mississippi Power has built a base load generating plant, which runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The facility will be fueled by abundant, low-cost Mississippi lignite and will provide reliable electricity to customers at a significantly lower cost than other alternatives.

The Kemper project is nearly 75 percent complete and is scheduled to begin operation in May 2014. The project has created 12,000 direct and indirect jobs during construction. When operational, it will create 1,000 direct and indirect jobs, while also contributing millions of dollars in tax payments to the Mississippi economy.

If approved, the requested increase will go into effect in April 2013.

Mississippi Power, a Southern Company subsidiary, serves approximately 186,000 customers in 23 southeast Mississippi counties.

My state is controlled by Repubs….this should be a given…….interesting in they got a tax break for upgrading, they got a tax break for hiring…..and yet they want the consumer to pay for their building……it is opened by the Southern Company, a for profit company and yet they want me to pay for their new building, while they will be charging me about $350 more a year for their service…..and will remain in effect after the construction completion……..this is the same company that fought any clean air additions saying that it would be bad for the consumer because they would have to pass along the cost……..isn’t capitalism a great thing?

The Truth About Renewables

Remember back about 6 months ago when gas prices were through the roof and it was all Obama’s fault….his policies were driving the prices of gas…..fast forward to today….gas prices are below $3 in some ares…and yet it is not Obama’s fault or his policies that are causing the price to drop…..why is that?

Sorry about that…but I had to get it off my chest…….and point a finger (middle one would be fine) at the morons that trys to tie gas prices to anything a president does….shows a serious lack of knowledge….but when have some ever let facts get in the way of their bullsh*t?

This post is about renewable energy and the problems……well the biggest problem…..

Electricity generated from renewable sources such as wind, marine and solar helps to cut carbon emissions by reducing the need for fossil fuel power generation. Renewable energy can also diversify supplies, helping to make a power system more resilient to failures and less exposed to fluctuating fuel prices. However, renewables pose a challenge in the form of intermittency, as their output varies with the available sunlight, wind speeds and wave activity.

Managing intermittency while keeping the system reliable can add costs. When renewables supply only a small proportion of the power on a grid this effect is negligible but as the proportion increases the costs can become more significant. For example, estimates suggest that managing intermittency would add about 1p to a unit of wind energy in the UK should wind supply around 30% of electricity. (That’s around a tenth of the current retail cost of power.)

In some situations, however, renewables can help meet peak demand, reducing the need for grid upgrading or new power stations. For example, in cities where the peak demand is for air-conditioning, solar generators can help supply power at peak times. Solar power can make a strong contribution to daytime power needs even in cloudier countries, as German experience has shown. Moreover, modern weather forecasting means that wind speeds can be predicted quite accurately over four-hour periods. This allows a planned response to variable generation.

In future, other options for managing intermittency may become cheaper. This will decrease the cost of adding renewables to the grid and allow the share of renewables to grow. Connecting grids over large geographical areas allows renewable power from a variety of climates to be combined, reducing overall variability and sharing out ‘backup’ fossil fuel power stations more widely. Storing electricity tends to be expensive, but innovation in storage technologies could make electrical backup systems cheaper. Finally, changes in consumer behaviour can help balance renewable electricity supply and demand. For example, the introduction of ‘smart’ meters will allow prices to be changed across the day to encourage people to shift consumption towards times of abundant supply. Householders in the UK have already been found to reduce their overall power use and shift towards daytime consumption after installing solar on their homes.

As the UK’s Guardian pointed out there can be some power problems with renewables….but personally I think it is worth the effort to try them and lessen our dependence on fossil fuel…..that is something we will never have until it is all gone….and then only then will companies start taking renewables seriously….

There Is Always An Environmental Trade-Off

When the new light bulbs became vogue, my daughter said that there had to be a trade off for something good.  She was right!  The new lights bulbs contain mercury and in the future there is a good possibilty for the mercury to make it into the water table.

Using that same question I checked into wind power….would there be a trade off for the good that the power source would be providing?  Of course there is!

Reuters has a pretty good article on the subjust:

For the most part the wind energy industry has coasted along with favorable press and public opinion. The industry has had to weather some resistance, particularly pertaining to wildlife impacts (primarily birds and bats) and the consistency and reliability of wind power. Yet these criticisms have not gained enough traction to have a noticeable effect on the growth of the industry, which is being hailed as a source of tens of thousands of potential new jobs in the evolving green economy.

Wind turbines emit inaudible sound waves in the low end of the sound spectrum and rhythmic vibrations caused by the spinning blades. These are suspected to cause a host of adverse health effects in some people that live in close proximity to the turbines, including:

insomnia,
headaches,
acute hypertensive episodes,
cardiac arrhythmia,
heart palpitations,
high blood pressure,
the sensation of bugs crawling on the skin,
humming in the head,
continuous ringing in the ears,
dizziness

My daughter seems to be always right….when something good and environmentally friendly is considered, there will always be a trade off.

Is Coal Based Power In Trouble?

An environmental review board has shot down the EPA approval of a new coal plant, stating that the Environment Protection Agency needs to come up with nationwide standards for dealing with carbon dioxide. The decision will cause lengthy and stricter rules, making the investment in expensive coal plants substantially riskier.

Therefore, the money will go into alternative energy, like solar or wind energy. The Environmental Appeals Boards’ decision to send the coal plans back to EPA with instructions to come up with standards was not a legal victory exactly, but the result is practically the same. Basically, the agency’s regional office has to at least consider whether to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, before it gives a green light to build the plant located in Utah.

Furthermore, the Board’s decision will delay the building of coal-fired power plants across the country, long enough for the Obama administration to determine its policy on coal, according to David Bookbinder, chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club, the one which made the petition to the Board in the first place.


This is the latest setback for coal plants, which emit far more carbon dioxide than any other natural gases or other power plants. Last year, Kansas state regulators denied a permit to a coal plant on the grounds of its carbon dioxide emissions. However, there are some voices that say the Clean Air Act is not well structured to regulate greenhouse gases. Anyway, it could still be used to regulate greenhouse gases while the new climate legislation appears.

Nukes: A Risky Technology

An opposing view of the latest hot button issue that McCain is pushing.

For several years, the nuclear industry has been touting nuclear power as a major solution for global warming. In fact, an increase in U.S. nuclear capacity could help reduce global warming — but it could increase threats to public safety and security at the same time.

Nuclear power is an unforgiving technology that requires vigilance by reactor operators and federal regulators. A large-scale release of radioactive material — triggered by an accident or terrorist attack — could kill thousands of people from radiation poisoning within weeks and tens of thousands from cancer within decades, and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damages.

U.S. nuclear power already is riskier than it should, and could, be. While there has not been a serious U.S. accident since the partial fuel meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, there have been some close calls. In 2002, for example, the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio came within months of a major accident when plant owners and federal inspectors looked the other way while corrosion nearly ate through the steel vessel housing the radioactive fuel, leaving only a thin metal layer to prevent cooling water from leaking.

U.S. nuclear plants also are vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Lax federal standards only require reactor owners to protect their plants from a relatively small team of attackers using unsophisticated weapons.

Certain new reactor designs appear to be safer and less vulnerable to attack but likely will be more expensive to build. And spiraling costs for raw materials and labor already have pushed the estimated price tag for new U.S. reactors as high as $12 billion.

Because the federal government does not require new reactors to be safer and more secure than current ones, there is little incentive for utilities to opt for more expensive, safer models. Thus, increasing the number of U.S. reactors would also increase the overall risk to the public — unless U.S. regulations are strengthened to require safer reactors.

Whether or not U.S. utilities build new power plants, the industry and its federal regulators must make safety and security their top priority.

As published in the USA Today.

A Nuke Industry Pep Rally

Nuclear power plants, which use atom-splitting fission to release energy and produce electricity, currently generate about 19 percent of America’s electrical output. A far greater percentage of the nation’s electricity is created with fossil fuels like coal, natural gas, and oil. These are used to heat water into steam which turns the blades of a turbine, which in turn rotates the shaft of an electrical generator, causing a coil of wire within the generator to spin in a magnetic field and create electricity. Coal today is used to produce about 49 percent of America’s electricity, while natural gas and petroleum account for another 20 percent and 2 percent, respectively. Other sources of electricity include:

  • hydropower (accounting for 7 percent of U.S. electrical production), where flowing water is used to spin the turbine·
  • geothermal power (less than 1 percent), which harnesses heat energy buried beneath the earth’s surface
  • solar power (less than 1 percent), which is four times more expensive than nuclear power and at least five times the cost of coal, and is undependable because it produces electricity only when the sun is shining.
  • wind power (less than 1 percent), which is similarly expensive and undependable because its turbines produce electricity only about a third of the time (i.e., when the wind is blowing)
  • biomass power (about 1 percent), a highly inefficient system that uses agricultural waste to produce electricity; to shift America’s electrical production entirely to biomass, a farming area ten times the size of Iowa would be required.
  • fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and petroleum) currently account for a combined 71 percent of U.S. electrical production.

Nuclear energy offers an extremely clean, cost-effective alternative to those fossil fuels. Nuclear plants put no carbon dioxide into the air, and the relatively miniscule quantities of radioactive waste they produce are stored in sealed, self-contained, carefully guarded sites. A coal-fired plant releases 100 times more radioactive material than an equivalent nuclear reactor—and not into a self-contained storage site but directly into the atmosphere. By generating electricity whose production otherwise would have required the use of fossil fuels, the 104 nuclear plants now operating in the U.S. prevent the release of approximately 700 million additional tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year; that is the equivalent of removing 96 percent of all passenger cars from U.S. roads.

If not for nuclear energy, America’s dependence on foreign oil would be even greater than it currently is. During the 1973 oil embargo, nuclear technology produced only 5 percent of the U.S. electric supply, while oil accounted for 17 percent. Today those figures are 19 percent and 2 percent, respectively. If more nuclear plants are constructed, they could replace coal and natural gas as America’s major source of electricity production.

There is some good info in this piece but is there something missing from this cheery little diatribe?

Alt Energy Realities

I want to believe in the wind.

Each megawatt of wind power costs about $53 to generate, making it more expensive than coal, nuclear or natural gas generation, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator. Even with economies of scale, it’s still going to be more expensive than other sources, based on projections by the American Wind Energy Association.

About half the states, including Texas, now require that part of their electricity come from renewable sources, and wind has vaulted in popularity, just as ethanol once held our fancy as the favored fuel of the future.

Wind power is an open trough of government subsidies, tax credits and state mandates. Taken together, it’s a massive corporate welfare effort that means big money for the wind-power developers and big costs for the rest of us.

For every $100 million of investment, wind-power developers have received more than $74 million in federal tax credits and other benefits, according to a recent study by Bernard Weinstein and Terry Clover, professors of applied economics at the University of North Texas. In Texas, we ladle on additional state and local incentives, including corporate income tax breaks and local property tax abatements.

The federal subsidies include renewable energy tax credits of about 2 cents for every kilowatt-hour produced. Those credits are set to expire at year’s end, but the industry is lobbying Congress to extend them. Some industry executives told The Associated Press recently they fear a slowdown in wind development if the credits expire.

The uncertainty of when wind power will come into the grid adds to the market volatility. Those variations put stress on the system and drive up wholesale power prices. Yet wind companies aren’t required to pay any of those costs. Instead they’re ultimately passed on to us.

Wind certainly has a place in our overall generating scheme. We need to diversify our energy sources, and we need to develop renewable ones. But it’s an auxiliary source. We
also need generation that’s reliable and makes economic sense.

McCain Pushes Nukes

Sen. John McCain proposed Wednesday to dramatically increase America’s commitment to nuclear power, calling for a crash program to build 45 reactors by 2030 and a long-term goal of building 100 such plants across the country.

McCain has long been a proponent of nuclear power. But his speech here included unabashed support for an energy source and technology that has been suspect in many communities since the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, the most serious commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history.

No nuclear power plant has been built in America in more than 30 years, and few U.S. companies have invested in the technology to build new plants. The nation draws about 20% of its electricity from 104 working commercial reactors, but many are nearing the end of the operating period allowed by their licenses

I agree that Nukes are probably going to be part of the answer to global warming.  But it should not be considered until there is a foolproof method of disposing of the waste.  But right now the industry gets taxpayer money in the form of subsidies.  I will support it when the waste thingy is solved and there is an end to government subsidies for the industry.  Think about it, if the industry cannot finance itself, why should the American people help?