Ga. Power Flings Gauntlet in Nuclear Debate

By Margaret Newkirk, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Feb. 2–Georgia Power dropped seven huge notebooks of documents off at the state Public Service Commission this week, officially kicking off the state’s debate over building new nuclear plants in Georgia.

The company filed its so-called integrated resource plan, which is the company’s prediction of state power demand over the next two decades and its plans to meet that demand. The company is required to file an IRP every three years — under a law drafted in response to huge nuclear construction cost overruns in the 1980s.

The company has been talking about two new nuclear units at its Plant Vogtle reactor in Waynesboro, near Augusta, for almost two years.

The IRP filing proposes that the company use those proposed plants to meet demand in 2015, putting the question of whether that approach is good public policy before the commission for the first time.

The previous version of the IRP had proposed meeting that same demand with natural gas. That plan was written before Congress made nuclear expansion a subsidy magnet in 2005. It also predated the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval of a new standardized design for nuclear plants, which made nuclear construction economically feasible again, the company said.

The IRP process will include a series of hearings and legal arguments, likely spanning the next five to six months.

And it’s already controversial.

In addition to the nuclear proposal itself, the IRP proposes exempting the company from a current PSC requirement that it take competitive bids when deciding how to meet new demand for the 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week kind of power called baseload. Nuclear and coal plants are typically baseload plants.

The company says it wants that exemption because baseload power plants are critical to the reliability of the electric system, and should be built by the home utility and not by a third party.

It means competing companies wouldn’t be offering up potentially cheaper ways to meet that 2015 demand, or any other large chunk of demand that requires such large plants in the future.

“I think this is positively outrageous,” said John Shelk, president of the Electric Power Supply Association in Washington. EPSA is a trade association for competitive power generating companies.

Shelk said independent power companies are already looking at building nuclear plants in other states, without the guarantee that their costs will be covered by ratepayers. He said Georgia Power’s request reflects a wider national push by monopoly utilities to lock up the new and potentially lucrative business of building needed power supplies.

Environmental advocates are also bracing for the IRP debate: “We’ve got more nuclear problems on our hands already, with the plants Georgia Power currently has,” said Rita Kilpatrick, Georgia policy director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “We think it’s too expensive, too risky and too polluting and it’s not the way to go.”

The company is also proposing five new energy efficiency programs, which seek to meet future demand by reducing it. That would be five more than the company has proposed at any time over the past 13 years.

The programs would reduce demand by about 66 megawatts over two years — or 66 Super Wal-Marts’ worth. Georgia Power says the need for new power generation capacity is growing by 400 to 500 megawatts per year. Industrial users typically oppose such programs, saying that they invested in energy efficiency at their plants years ago and don’t want to subsidize similar measures for residential and commercial power users.

The plan also includes three new renewable power generation projects in which Georgia Power has a stake, and the already announced conversion of coal-fired Plant McDonough in Cobb County into cleaner gas-fired plants.

But neither the IRP nor related filings this week detailed where Georgia Power planned to build a massive new natural gas pipeline to feed those plants. News of that pipeline broke last month, after an East Point resident spotted surveyors in an existing Georgia Power transmission corridor next to his house. At the time, Georgia Power said it would include the route in the filings made this week.

The company says it still hasn’t decided on a route and that it would like to announce one only after going door to door to inform neighbors along that pipeline’s path.

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