Georgia Power probably won’t have to embark on massive new construction to meet proposed federal limits on carbon.
That’s the assessment of the former director of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute after studying the federal proposal issued last week.
“It surprised me how little new construction they require,” said retired director Sam Shelton, who has consulted for power companies.
So far, neither Georgia Power nor state environmental regulators have given a public assessment of what it might cost Georgia consumers to comply with the proposed standards, which are intended to limit destructive climate change.
Georgia Power spokesman John Kraft wrote in an email Friday that the company hasn’t completed its analysis. Still, he added,the utility believes the possible regulations would be “forcing Americans to pay higher electricity prices and hurting the diversity of our energy supply.”
Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said the impact of the new carbon rules will be unclear until Georgia environmental officials come up with a compliance plan, which may not be until 2016.
If state officials emphasize energy conservation, Smith said, “it’s likely peoples’ bills will go down.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed limits on carbon dioxide from existing power plants provoked sharp debate between environmental groups that favor tight rules and business groups that fear higher costs.
The cost impact is made more uncertain because the EPA allows each state to decide how to make cuts. Proposed standards would require Georgia to slash carbon emissions from power generation by more than 40 percent by 2030. That’s more — in some cases, far more — than most states.
But cuts were crafted in a way that make each state’s challenge similar, said Shelton, who had led the Strategic Energy Institute until 2007.
He analyzed an EPA scenario for how Georgia might meet the new limits. It showed most of the cuts could be made by running existing natural gas plants more and coal plants less, as well as completing Georgia Power’s nuclear expansion at Plant Vogtle. Shelton said that suggests Georgia ratepayers wouldn’t have to pay for construction of additional nuclear units or new natural gas plants to meet the standards.
But he said as Georgia’s energy mix changes, customers could pay comparatively higher electric bills if the price of natural gas goes up more than the cost of coal.
He said it appears additional pollution reductions could be achieved with relatively limited costs: improving the efficiency of existing coal plants, convincing people and businesses to be more energy efficient and doubling use of alternative energy sources. Renewables such as hydro and solar power account for about 3 percent of Georgia Power’s energy mix. But the company plans to increase solar tenfold by late 2016, sometimes at a cost lower than that of existing power production.
