They ran the op-ed last week online, and today the Valdosta Daily Times (VDT) put it on top of page 5A:
This newspaper op-ed has already resulted in a call about a water issue.
-jsq, John S. Quarterman, Suwannee RIVERKEEPER®
You can join this fun and work by becoming a WWALS member today!
Op-ed in the Valdosta Daily Times today:
Thanks, VDT, for your Sunday solar story and editorial!
Your editorial’s “buyer beware” would better be directed towards the electric utilities, which set up the price mismatch that caused the problem for the customer in your story. The story says, citing John Kraft of Georgia Power, “The utility company offers to pay the producer only as much as it costs to produce solar power. If a utility company can produce solar energy at a solar farm for 5 cents per unit, it isn’t going to pay a residential producer a higher rate for energy it doesn’t need.”
If Georgia Power does not need new energy, why is it building two new nuclear units at Plant Vogtle and charging its customers in advance every month? Four years ago Google already bought more sun and wind power than that nuclear boondoggle would produce if it’s ever finished, and for less than the Plant Vogtle cost overruns. Those cost overruns keep going up, and the cost of solar panels keeps going down.
The story says Kraft asks people why they want solar power. Maybe to Continue reading
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Hahira, Georgia, July 27, 2017 — On Monday, WWALS Watershed Coalition asked the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) to take Southern Company (SO) CEO Tom Fanning up on his suggestion that the PSC could affect the SO board’s August self-imposed deadline about the two new nuclear units at Plant Vogtle: to go ahead despite the bankruptcy of Toshiba, or not. WWALS also asked the PSC, like it did four years ago, to require Georgia Power to buy more solar power.
Suwannee Riverkeeper John S. Quarterman wrote to Georgia PSC: “The Mississippi Public Service Commission in June refused Continue reading
Update 2017-07-28: See also VDT op-ed and letter to GA-PSC.
Five years ago I asked Southern Company (SO) CEO Tom Fanning what was his exit plan when the Big Bets on Kemper Coal in Mississippi and the two new Plant Vogtle nuclear units on the Savannah River go bad. This Wednesday SO stopped using coal at Kemper Coal after the MS PSC refused to authorize further cost overruns. Thursday GA PSC staff said Plant Vogtle is no longer economical. It is time for GA PSC to do for Plant Vogtle what MS PSC did for Kemper Coal.
As Suwannee Riverkeeper at this year’s meeting in May, I told Fanning we don’t want SO’s coal ash in any landfill on any river in the Suwannee River Basin; I asked him for solar panels at Moody Air Force Base to shut down a natural gas pipeline; and I questioned SO’s acquisition of Pivotal LNG with its deal to ship liquid natural gas in bomb trucks down I-75 and I-10 to Jacksonville, Florida.
I reminded our genial host of my question five years ago, with the handwriting already on the wall since the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had then just referred to Plant Vogtle as a financial quagmire. This time I asked Fanning to lead us all to sun and wind power.
In SO’s own video you can see them Continue reading
What’s more effective than valve turning or tower toppling? Divestment.
WWALS Watershed Coalition advocates non-violent opposition to the unnecessary, destructive, and hazardous Sabal Trail fracked methane pipeline. As an organization, we do not participate in property damage, either. (Individual WWALS members may of course do whatever they like, as long as they don’t say they’re doing it on behalf of WWALS.) Among many other reasons, I think there is a more effective tactic: fossil fuel divestment. I think this because of the history of the anti-nuclear movement and because of how fast fossil fuel divestment is going compared to earlier divestment movements.
Photo:
Ken Ward, EcoWatch, 6 March 2017,
The Climate Data That Led to a Hung Jury
This reminds me of something long ago. Steve Liptay, Vimeo, 16 October 2016, SHUT IT DOWN TODAY, Continue reading
What’s going on at the end of Sabal Trail’s Citrus County Line
at Duke’s new natural gas plant in Crystal River, Florida?
The End of Line is the square in the upper left of the picture. But what’s all that equipment just east across the access road at 14001 West Power Line Street, Crystal River, FL, 28.963298, -82.667413? According to the Citrus County Property Appraiser, that other property is one small corner of a huge tract owned by HCR LIMESTONE INC, ATTN HOLCIM TAX DEPARTMENT, 201 JONES RD, WALTHAM MA 02451.
Meanwhile, there’s no activity at Continue reading
The extent of the greedy grasp of the fossil fuel industry for
more last-gasp profits before solar and wind power take over is usually hidden because the projects get approved individually, often by different agencies.
Here’s at least a partial list of such projects (and nukes) that Waterkeeper®
Members or Affiliates oppose in Florida.
Spectra’s Sabal “Sinkhole” Trail is not just one pipeline; it’s the camel’s nose under the tent for its conjoined twin pipelines, its ugly stepsister pipelines and LNG export operations, and its stepchildren the “modernized” new natural gas plants.
Anybody want to help draw a map of all this?
Continue readingApproved 12 June 2013 by unanimous vote of the WWALS board, Dave has mailed a signed copy to the Georgia Public Service Commission, and I will go read it to the PSC Tuesday morning at 10 AM 18 June 2013, at their hearing about
Docket 36498, Georgia Power Company’s 2013 Integrated Resource Plan and Application for Decertification of Various Unitsand
Docket 36499, Application for the Certification of Amended Demand Side Management Plan
Y’all come! -jsq
From: WWALS Watershed Coalition, Inc.
3338 Country Club Road #L336
Valdosta, GA 31605
12 June 2013To: Georgia
Public Service Commission
244 Washington Street, SW
Atlanta GA, 30334-9052
Dear Public Service Commissioners and Staff,
The recent rains have swollen our blackwater rivers, Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, and Little, under our longleaf pines and Spanish-moss-covered oaks, and filled up the tea-colored tannin waters in our frog-singing pocosin cypress swamps here in central South Georgia. But that was only a dent in our protracted drought that ranges from mild to extreme, with projections not much better.
We do not need more traditional big baseload power plants gulping down our river or aquifer water when solar and wind power use far less, and those renewables are now at grid parity with coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
Power plants are thirsty, as the Union of Concerned Scientists pointed out in a 2011 report, “Freshwater Use by U.S. Power Plants: Electricity’s Thirst for a Precious Resource”.
Much of the water used to cool power plants evaporates, and is Continue reading