nuclear-news

 By RICHARD MINITER,  THE MORNING CALL MAY 01, 2019 

Pennsylvania and New Jersey lawmakers are preparing to push up your monthly electricity bill … in order to shovel subsidies to failing nuclear-power plants. Consumers like you are projected to pay billions in higher electricity bills over the next decade — killing jobs and shrinking your savings in the bargain.

What’s driving this? For the past few years, natural-gas pipelines have delivered cheap fuel, shrinking the cost of generating electricity. It is now cheaper to make electricity with natural gas than with any other fossil fuel. That’s a big win for consumers and manufacturers. But it is bad news for nuclear-power plant operators, whose generating costs are often higher than the market price for power.

So now nuclear-power operators hope to persuade lawmakers that taxpayers should bail them out. And their plan, backed by a pile of lobbying dollars, is working.

The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities awarded “zero-emissions certificates” on April 18 to three state nuclear plants, all owned and operated by investor-owned utility Public Service Enterprise Group. That’s a subsidy of some $300 million per year. Those subsidies will be paid by surcharges on consumer electric bills. The Newark Star-Ledger summed it up best: “For PSEG, a windfall. For us, the shaft.”

And Pennsylvania is not far behind the Garden State.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Thomas Mehaffie, a Republican, has introduced a bill that would offer subsidies to the Keystone state’s five nuclear plants. He says the plan will cost some $500 million per year — raising utility bills roughly $21.24 per home per year. The real cost will be much higher, critics say, pointing to estimates of more than $60 per year per household.

The battle is not over yet in Pennsylvania. Lawmakers in Harrisburg are getting an earful from the AARP and consumer groups. State regulators also believe the Pennsylvania bailout proposal is misguided. Public Utility Commissioner Andrew Place sent a memo to members of the state Senate saying that “this bill, in its current form, is far from the least cost mechanism to achieve these goals.”

No kidding. In fact, the subsidy plan is so broadly written that it would also fund nuclear plants, like Beaver Valley Nuclear Station, that are not actually losing money.

What’s clear is that utilities are getting what they paid for. In New Jersey, PSEG reportedly spent some $2.4 million lobbying for subsidies in 2017.

In Pennsylvania, the company that owns the struggling Three Mile Island plant — Exelon — reportedly tripled its lobbying expenditures since 2016, spending $1.78 million in 2018.

While the nuclear-power industry can’t seem to make money off its failing plants, it has certainly figured out how to squeeze a return on investment from its lobbyists and its campaign contributions.

The hard truth is that plain-old competition is killing the dinosaur utilities. Thanks to natural gas, U.S. manufacturers enjoy lower industrial kilowatt per-hour prices than all of the other 35 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, except Norway. That is a huge advantage for factories in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

Subsidies just slow the inevitable. No bailout can change the reality that nuclear plants are whales beached by high insurance and regulatory costs. Their losses should provoke soul-searching among shareholders and far-reaching reforms of current management — not a cry for government bailouts…….. https://www.mcall.com/opinion/mc-opi-pennsylvania-nuclear-industry-bailout-20190501-hjzucrrqm5hovcunhj7dencnly-story.html