nuclear-news

Nuclear companies lobby USA States to legislate against renewables and energy efficienct

Why the nuclear industry targets renewables instead of gas, Midwest Energy news,  on 02/06/2015 by Kari Lydersen Cheap natural gas has upended the nation’s energy landscape and made aging nuclear power plants increasingly uncompetitive.

Yet the nuclear industry, which generates almost a fifth of the nation’s energy, has declared war not on gas but on wind and solar, which represent about 4 and 0.2 percent of our energy mix, respectively.

Nuclear generators have successfully fought against renewable and energy efficiency standards on the state level, and lobbied against tax incentives for wind and solar on the federal level. They’re in the process of securing changes in regional capacity markets that would benefit nuclear and harm solar and wind.

And as states develop their Clean Power Plans to fulfill the federal mandate to reduce carbon emissions, nuclear is often pitted against renewables.

In deregulated states like Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, nuclear generators have found it increasingly difficult to sell their power at a profit on open markets, because of competition primarily from gas but also from wind.

Meanwhile, energy efficiency and distributed solar generation have reduced demand for electricity and are part of a fundamental shift which could significantly shrink the role of large, centralized power plants……..

Chicago-based Exelon, the country’s largest nuclear generator, has said that three of its six Illinois plants could close if state lawmakers don’t provide “market-based solutions” to help them become more profitable. A diverse group of business and clean energy interests are campaigning against an Exelon “bailout,” as critics call it, pegged at $580 million, saying citizens have already subsidized the company more than enough.

Exelon’s fortunes have plummeted in recent years, though a report recently released by Illinois state agencies indicated the company is exaggerating the crisis facing its Illinois plants.

As part of the report, required by a 2014 law pushed by Exelon, Illinois officials considered the possibility of a low-carbon energy standard similar to the state’s renewable standard. If nuclear energy were allowed to fulfill state clean energy goals, advocates fear the nuclear plants would overwhelm the program and leave little or no incentive for new renewable energy.

Exelon also pressured state legislators last spring to halt a planned “fix” of the state’s renewable energy standard, which would have facilitated the development of more wind and solar power. New wind development in Illinois has stalled because of the problems with the standard. Legislation to fix it will likely be introduced again this spring, with Exelon again weighing in and trying to tie any changes to support for its nuclear plants.

Ohio: Trouble in Toledo

In Ohio, FirstEnergy successfully lobbied to suspend the state’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards. Now FirstEnergy is asking that ratepayers be forced to pay a guaranteed rate for energy from the troubled Davis-Besse nuclear plant near Toledo, under a proposal pending before the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.

“Clearly FirstEnergy was seeing both energy efficiency and renewable energy as direct competitors,” said Allison Fisher, energy program outreach director of the watchdog group Public Citizen. “The arguments they were using were that these mandatory standards are distorting the market and are costly to ratepayers. But as soon as the standards were frozen, they turned around and proposed a plan that is looking to distort the market and going to cost $3 billion.”

If the plan is approved, the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel estimates it could cost ratepayers an extra $3.2 billion.

“It’s both their actions and the hypocrisy of their arguments that makes what they are doing so incredibly brazen,” Fisher continued……….

Renewable energy advocates say it is ironic that companies with nuclear plants are asking for government assistance because their plants are facing challenges on the open market – given that the same companies pushed for deregulation in years past, when nuclear plants stood to benefit from market conditions.

“They are operating in a deregulated market, but they’re trying to re-regulate again,” said Fisher. “It’s important to remember that they’re failing in the marketplace and they’re not making changes to their business model, instead they’re going into the political and regulatory arenas. Their strategy is killing their competition by eliminating energy efficiency and renewable energy as incentivized [sources], then going to regulators asking to bail them out.”

Nuclear engineer Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, called the nuclear generators’ requests for subsidies “outrageous.”

“These free-marketeers are going to the government with hat in hand whenever they have trouble raising revenues,” he said. “But when they make a lot of money they don’t offer to give the excess back to ratepayers.”http://www.midwestenergynews.com/2015/02/06/why-the-nuclear-industry-targets-renewables-instead-of-gas/

February 7, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA