Kemper County Power Plant a disaster: Southern Company wants to stick you with more (cow)bill

And when the costs get passed along with the parties in charge bearing little financial risk it is no surprise to see a chart like this one. The runup into the latest earnings release is especially interesting.

Kemper County power plant price tag tops $6.1 billion as costs climb again, start-up delayed ~ Associated Press

I’m going to be spending some time on Edgar learning more about this mess for myself.  I see stockcharts like the one linked above against the backdrop of these massive cost overruns at Kemper County and the term moral hazard immediately comes to mind. In layman’s terms, it is easy to take risks when someone else bears a disproportionate share of the financial burden.

Stay tuned because this is likely not the last of the bad news form Southern Company and the Kemper coal boondoggle.

15 thoughts on “Kemper County Power Plant a disaster: Southern Company wants to stick you with more (cow)bill”

  1. My electrical power is provided by Coast Electric. I understand they buy from more than one source thru a cooperative. I just wonder how this Kemper disaster brought to the people of our state by our politicians will effect EPAs like Coast Electric ? I guess Haley Barbour will be traveling around the state as a Ms.Power lobbyist telling everyone who will listen that the Kemper technology is our future. We should all figure out how to get the hell off of the grid.

    1. The Electric Co-ops like Coast and Singing River buy a large majority of their power from MS Power. Actually, their umbrella organization, South Mississippi Electric Power Association, was supposed to buy roughly 17-20% of the Kemper Plant. Although that was back when they still had everyone thinking it would cost $2 Billion.

      We need a thorough investigation of Edgar, along with Uncle Ben, Boss Hogg, and Deputy Phil. Seems to me that Day was just the fall guy though. Previous CEOs pushed it thorough.

      1. Hell yes! Do a thorough investigation of Edgar, maybe even investigate Emma 😉

        On a serious note- the details in the long term power supply contracts will determine the pain shared by other utilities and their shareholders and customers.

  2. Voters in Mississippi need to understand their representatives did not represent THEM when they went along with former Public Service Commissioner Leonard Bentz, Barbour, Bryant to build this monstrosity of an unproven power plant with the poorest state in the nation’s citizens who will pick up the tab.

    And remember Tuesday, a vote for Cochran is a vote for Barbour.

    1. Mr. Rodgers.

      I read you loud and clear about how voters need to understand who is representing them and how they are not doing their jobs. Bryant received a pile of brownie points from rednecks and boys in the hunting clubs when the right to hunt law was voted in favor. I find that that law was about as stupid as they come and would have been more fitting if it were the year 1812. I have nothing against hunting but to make it a right this day in age is dumb. More especially when the stocks of wildlife are low and poachers are rampant. This includes the ones that pile up deer corn and the dog runners. I find it completely unsportsmanlike.

      A common excuse you will hear is population control. How often are we overran with white tailed deer backing up hwy 90 and I-10?

  3. Careful out there taxpayers! Probably a song to go with this, but I drew a blank.

    Choctaw Co. taxpayers stuck with $22.5M bill on hospital

    The changes allowed the hospital management company to bail and the county to lose the company’s lease payment that was supposed to service the debt.

    “So taxpayers owe $22.5 million for a $12 million facility, and the revenue source is gone,” said Kenny King, a former Choctaw County supervisor who has closely followed the ins and outs of the hospital saga.

    Lots of juicy details, the taxpayers are rightly enraged. Take a number, Feel’s busy.

    1. Something very similar happened in Stone County back in the mid 90s. The losers are everyone that pays property taxes..

  4. MS Power are getting desperate! They have been running ads in the Sun Herald telling how great Kemper will be for us idiots who will pay and pay…….

    Last night Ed Day was on WLOX TV touting the same ole, same ole but using fear tactics. They are the ones who created this mess and the ratepayers should not have to pick up the tab.

    The State Supreme Court has ruled against them in their under the table tactics of building an unneeded power plant that Boss Hog pushed, Lawnmower Gas Phil continued, Bentz pushed until Daddy got him a higher paying job and South Mississippi is left with paying the piper.

    I thought Republicans were against unnecessary spending but I have not heard them singing in the choir against Kemper.

    1. At some point there may be a problem selling the captured CO2 for oil production. Oil prices may continue to fall. How much dry ice can they sell?

  5. Interesting details on a 501c4 which may be financially connected with a close associate of Alabama’s soon to be divorced Governor Bentley.

    Who is Rebekah Caldwell Mason? Gov. Bentley’s advisor paid $426,978 in 2014 election

    Sources say Mason is paid – either as a contractor or employee – through the Alabama Council for Excellent Government, a non-profit organization formed in February by Cooper Shattuck, general counsel for the University of Alabama board of trustees and Bentley’s former legal adviser. At the time, Shattuck said the organization was formed at the request of Bentley to promote his plans for tax increases.

    So then this little detail:

    The Alabama Council for Excellent Government’s website, acegov.com, lists Marquita Davis and R.B. Walker as the group’s other two board members. Davis is a former state finance director under Bentley and current executive director of the Jefferson County Committee for Economic opportunity. Walker is an assistant to the Executive Vice President at Alabama Power.

    1. So one day after one of AL.com’s political reporters rips Roger Shuler on Facebook for naming Caldwell Mason as the Gov’s paramour without proof another AL.com reporter names Caldwell Mason the very next day after Gawker picks up Shuler’s reporting. Telling huh.

      1. Yes.

        Whether or not Bentley was schtupping the staff there is (and has been) a Bentley story. There is at least one something causing a lot of smoke. It must cost al.com something to curate thousands of comments on some of these posts in order to censor and scrub certain words and viewpoints not to mention accusations.

        Bentley wins re-election running under what is now obviously a false flag.. Suddenly a major fiscal disaster requiring major tax increases and multiple special leg. sessions is ‘discovered’. The Governor’s holier than thou visage has the taint of his divorce which somehow will be happening under seal. As the governor files public financial disclosures it that what is to be hidden under seal? Or is it something else? The average citizen of Alabama does not appoint friendly judges and thus can not take advantage of Bentley’s “public persons needing privacy” loophole.

        Then there is the already disclosed matter of the very well paid and very well promoted (‘re-allocation’ how about the ‘de-allocation’ of some cronies!) state trooper.

        The Governor has a 501c4 to

        Well shit! I just realized al.com admits to thinking like I do. Just now I see what they put up this earlier this morning:

        A sure scandal in Gov. Robert Bentley’s Administration

        Lost in all the sordid rumor and implication is a rock-solid fact.

        Rebekah Caldwell Mason, a chief adviser to the governor of the state of Alabama, is paid by unknown entities with money funneled through an opaque non-profit. And that shadowy operation – it doesn’t have to reveal its donors — is set up by people connected to the state’s most powerful and politically aggressive institutions.

        Hell, that may be the most offensive thing in this whole bizarre chain of events.

        What self-interested person or business wouldn’t give their first-born spawn to wield that kind of influence in the governor’s office?

        Ya think?

        Bonus: Mr. R.B. Walker a young pol on the make. I suppose young Mr. Walker’s thorough entwinement in the Bentley administration has the appropriate approvals from the Government Relations Department from Alabama Power’s big daddy Southern.

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