It’s an all-too-familiar story. Southern Company subsidiary Georgia Power has again announced a delay in the long-anticipated, long-delayed, and vastly over budget opening of its two-unit Vogtle nuclear expansion project.
Construction on the two-unit, 2,000-MW project, using Westinghouse AP-1000 advanced pressurized water reactors, began in 2009, with an anticipated startup of the first unit in 2016, with the second unit online in 2017. The estimated cost for the two units was $14 billion. Georgia Power’s exposure was estimated at $6 billion, with the remainder loaded onto state public power systems.
The project is the first new nuclear project in the U.S. in more than 30 years. It had a sister project at South Carolina’s V.C. Summer site, also a two-unit, 2,000-MW Westinghouse APR design. That $10 billion project collapsed in 2017. The failure led to the demise of the parent utility, SCANA, and criminal indictments of two Westinghouse executives.
The schedule and cost estimates at Vogtle proved wildly optimistic. Georgia Power’s current, and likely also optimistic, guess is for the first new unit to come online in the third quarter of 2022 and the second unit in the second quarter of 2023. The new cost estimate from various analysts, but not the utility, is a total cost of the project of around $27 billion.
Georgia Power CEO Chris Womack said, “We are going to build these units the right way, without compromising safety and quality to achieve a schedule deadline. We have endured and overcome some extraordinary circumstances building the first new nuclear units in the US in more than 30 years.”
What’s the cost impact to customers of the latest delay? That’s unknown, although it will certainly push the cost higher. The Associated Press reported, a week before the latest Georgia Power announcement, that based on earlier announced delays, “Georgia Power Co. customers are likely to pay another $224 million a year for the first of two nuclear reactor near Augusta.”
The AP account added, “A $257 million rate hike costing a typical residential customer $2.87 a month, is also set to begin Jan. 1. That’s part of a three-year plan approved by the [Georgia Public Service Commission] in 2019. Customers are also likely to see a third separate rate hike, to allow Georgia Power to cover higher fuel costs.”
The state regulators have been steadfast in their support for the project. Georgia Power is Atlanta-based giant utility holding company Southern Company’s largest subsidiary. The staff of the PSC have been far more skeptical of the project, but that has not swayed the elected Republican commission.
–Kennedy Maize
(kenmaize@gmail.com)