JEA is finalizing a contract that would blend 206 megawatts of nuclear energy – enough energy to light up about 20,000 homes – into the region’s power portfolio.
The energy, which will be critical as the region grows, will be purchased from a nuclear plant in Eastern Georgia and make up about 5 percent of the utility’s energy mix.
JEA’s board of directors decided earlier this year that nuclear energy should make up about 10 percent of its power. The move was in response to a changing political climate at the state and federal levels calling for lower carbon emissions.
The 20-year contract with the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia is expected to start in 2016, after Plant Vogtle is expanded. The plant is about 30 miles south of Augusta.
Randy Boswell, JEA’s vice president for corporate data, said the deal is done and he’s awaiting the final paperwork. He said the city-owned utility likely will pay about $80 for every 1,000 kilowatt-hours it needs from the plant. The cost would add up to millions of dollars annually, he said.
“That’s in 2016 dollars. It would be the equivalent of about $50 today,” Boswell said. “That’s a big number, but based on where we are with coal and gas, that’s competitive.”
Using natural gas to generate 1,000 kilowatt-hours generally costs from $90 to $100, he said, which cuts into revenue potential. Consumers had been paying $95.93 for the same amount of energy, but this month will begin paying $110.93. JEA raised the rate to offset a $61 million deficit as the cost of fuel skyrocketed in recent months.
Fuel costs and pollution concerns thrust into question how many nuclear reactors could be built in the United States in coming years. Boswell said it’s unclear at this point how nuclear energy will affect JEA customer bills.
While the plants cost billions to build, they generally are cheaper to run than coal and natural gas plants, Boswell said. Another plus is that they don’t emit the carbon dioxide that more-widely-used fossil fuels do. That could be a key step in curbing future utility costs as federal legislators continue to debate whether businesses should pay for the pollution they create.
An additional factor: Gov. Charlie Crist challenged the state’s utilities last year to reduce coal in their energy diet. The move crushed plans to build new coal plants, including one for JEA.
Boswell said JEA has no plans to build a nuclear reactor, but is continuing to shop around for a share of the power generated at plants such as the one in Georgia.
Carbon caps are ridiculous. Look, either rising CO2 levels mean global warming, or they do not. The fact that we haven’t had any global warming for 10 years means that rising CO2 levels are not having a significant effect on temperatures.
We’ve been “warming” about 1 C per 100 years since the recovery from the little ice age, and that warming was not caused by CO2 levels. Temperatures have been on an approximate 30-year cycle for the last 500 years, alternating between warming and cooling. The last warming cycle did not bring us up to the temperatures reached in the 1930s.
I haven’t been worried about “global warming” while living in Florida during the hysteria (its hard to get hysterical when the older people in your family lived through warmer temperatures), and I won’t get hysterical when the temperatures are cooling. People in the north that are going to be affected by colder winter weather and expensive heat might want to pay attention, though.
