Waiting for a verdict on Vogtle
Electricity consumers in Georgia have been paying — or rather, down-paying — for several years now on the cost of two nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle on the Savannah River. Georgia Power customers who have been paying an average of about $100 a year more on residential bills for that project could find out today if what they’ve been billed for in advance ever gets finished.
Or not.
A Wednesday story by business writer Russell Grantham in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes that the utility company’s agreement with its once-powerful but now financially devastated contractor to keep work going at the site expires today. Georgia Power owns almost half of the Vogtle project, with the rest shared by the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, Oglethorpe Power and Dalton Utilities.
Georgia Power and the primary contractor on the Vogtle expansion project, Westinghouse Electric, “will continue to work on finalizing a new service agreement that would, if necessary, assure that Westinghouse continues to provide design, engineering and procurement services,” according to a Georgia Power email to the AJC.
Except there’s one rather significant hitch: Westinghouse declared bankruptcy March 29, mostly as a result of massive losses on Vogtle and another nuclear plant in South Carolina, two days after Danny Roderick was ousted as Westinghouse chairman.
Southern Company, Grantham reports, is seeking $3.7 billion from Toshiba, Westinghouse’s parent company, as part of the contractual financing to keep the project going.
Except that Toshiba is also reported to be on the verge of bankruptcy. According to a story on CNBC’s website, Toshiba has lost some $9 billion, mostly on those two projects — a financially disastrous outcome it attributes mostly to Westinghouse’s 2015 purchase of a nuke plant construction company from Chicago Bridge & Iron.
Multibillion-dollar money woes, as most Georgians are aware, aren’t the only issues involved in the ever-mutating monster that the Vogtle expansion has become.
The Georgia Public Service Commission still has some say in the matter, and its members are elected officials. Environmental groups and disgruntled ratepayers, among others, are leaning on the PSC to put the project on indefinite hold.
Attorney Kurt Ebersbach of the Southern Environmental Law Center told the AJC that shelving the Vogtle expansion now makes economic as well as environmental sense because power demand has grown more slowly than Georgia Power’s projections, and major new power generation (by the SELC’s own projections) won’t be needed in Georgia for more than a decade.
The one point on which all concerned would have to agree is that right now, the Plant Vogtle expansion project is a total mess. It’s a $20 billion engineering and construction job that’s run out of money because its contractor is out of money and its contractor’s parent company is in the process of running out of money.
Meanwhile, millions of Georgians have already paid millions of dollars for it, while others say it’s not even needed. Stay tuned.
This story was originally published May 11, 2017 at 6:02 PM with the headline "Waiting for a verdict on Vogtle."