Despite a concerted pressure campaign by leaders of Jacksonville’s electric utility, the directors of a Georgia power agency emerged from a closed-door meeting Monday and quickly voted to move forward with a controversial nuclear power project in that state.
For now, that means local ratepayers are still on the hook for subsidizing the only active nuclear power project in the United States, two under-construction reactors in eastern Georgia near the South Carolina border.
The Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia was also under pressure from the state’s most powerful politician, Gov. Nathan Deal, to move ahead with the Plant Vogtle nuclear expansion project despite a raft of cost increases and time delays, and to do so over the objections of JEA, which holds a 2008 purchase-power agreement obligating Jacksonville ratepayers to help build and eventually purchase power from the reactors. That obligation is set to cost JEA in excess of $2.5 billion and is theoretically uncapped if the project becomes more expensive.
A recently announced cost increase to the some $27 billion Vogtle project triggered a vote among the co-owners on whether to keep moving forward. Ninety percent ownership interest was required to keep the reactors on track. Executives at the various power agencies involved all had agreed to move forward by Monday evening, though not entirely without some caveats. One owner, Oglethorpe Power Corporation, approved a “conditional” vote in favor based on adopting a way to control costs, including potentially capping them at the current price tag for its customers.
Oglethorpe owns 30 percent of the project, giving it a significant voice. It wants Georgia Power — a private utility that owns the most interest in the project — to bear more risk for cost overruns on the project.
“Capping our costs ... is a reasonable request and a prudent business decision that would allow the project to move forward,” said Mike Smith, president and CEO of Oglethorpe Power, in a statement Monday evening.
It’s not clear if Georgia Power would accept a price cap, perhaps at least for now shifting the drama away from JEA and toward Oglethorpe and Georgia Power.
In brief remarks following a closed executive session Monday that lasted about an hour, authority board members acknowledged they were about to make a decision of large importance that affects ratepayers in Georgia, Northeast Florida and parts of Alabama. The board then quickly and unanimously approved a motion to continue Vogtle.
JEA, in a statement Monday evening, blasted the decision to continue moving forward and said authority officials ignored a counter-offer from JEA that it said would have provided both agencies with replacement power that would be cheaper than what they could get from Vogtle in the future. Authority board members said they considered all the information presented to them by various agencies and consultants.
“Ratepayers across Georgia, Alabama and northeast Florida are shouldering this project’s exorbitant and ever-ballooning costs with no guarantee they will receive the power promised by the new units,” the statement said. “All of the project owners are responsible for the interests of our collective ratepayers, and JEA will continue working to find a course of action that relieves them of this unfair burden.”
JEA and the authority are in the middle of dueling lawsuits against one another over the 2008 purchase-power agreement. In addition to the lawsuit, JEA sought to shame authority board members in the days ahead of Monday’s vote by purchasing ads in Georgia newspapers and billboard space. The relationship between the two agencies has soured significantly in recent weeks over Vogtle as JEA shifted course from its once publicly reticent stance on the project to outward opposition under interim CEO Aaron Zahn.
That has put JEA squarely against a powerful bloc of Georgia’s political establishment — which views the Vogtle reactors as a major economic development and jobs driver — but has also aligned it with the views of environmental groups opposed to the project.
″(The authority’s) decision to go forward with the Vogtle nuclear units despite serious objections by a key utility partner of theirs, (JEA), and additional massive cost overruns and continued mismanagement represents yet another broken promise for electric power customers in Georgia, who will suffer because of the inability for the owners and their regulators to make hard decisions,” said Sara Barczak, regional advocacy director with Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, in a statement.
Georgia Power, the largest minority shareholder in Plant Vogtle, had already voted to proceed with the project, which along with the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, represents about 68 percent ownership interest. Oglethorpe Power, which owns 30 percent of the units, also voted Monday to move forward.
Click here to read the Florida Times-Union article.