Some Xcel Energy customers got lower tax refunds than they expected. But don’t blame Trump and Noem; blame Xcel Energy, which undercounted their refunds, then tried to make other customers pay the difference.
Last year the Public Utilities Commission told Xcel and other power companies to share their big new corporate tax breaks with their customers. Xcel complied, but it got its math wrong, shorting some 7,500-plus customers by an average of $30 a head. As Bob Mercer explains, Xcel sent extra payments to make up the difference in December, but…
Xcel asked the commission last month, in writing, for permission to make itself whole again.
Xcel wanted to do it by diverting some money the company owed customers under a separate refund program.
Xcel attorney Ryan Long spoke to the commission by telephone Friday about that request.
Long said the company otherwise would look at a surcharge for customers who received too much.
…”Our perspective is the company’s customers in South Dakota have benefited over time from our ability to move quickly. We don’t make mistakes like this very often, and all we’re asking for here is to be made whole without having to surcharge any customers,” Long continued [Bob Mercer, “Xcel Erred On Amounts Of Tax-Cut Refunds To Thousands Of South Dakota Customers,” KELO-TV, updated 2019.02.16].
Bonk on that, said the PUC staff:
Xcel corrected this oversight by implementing a supplemental refund in November 2018 to the approximate 7,500 customers affected in the amount of $252,677. Xcel now wishes to be made whole by requesting this $252,677 supplemental refund be subtracted from the DOE refund owed its customers for a net August 2019 refund amount of $605,681.
…However, Staff believes this error by Xcel to not follow stipulated language in the TCJA docket should not affect refunds due to customers in this DOE refund docket.
…This happened to one other company subsequent their initial TCJA refund; however, the difference is this other company has not requested to be reimbursed for these excess refund dollars through another mechanism. Staff believes this demonstrates the other company recognized its error in not strictly adhering to the settlement stipulation and Xcel should likewise follow this approach and not expect customers to correct this error by partially offsetting the DOE payment with the supplemental refund amount [Patrick Steffensen, Joseph Rezac, and Amanda Reiss, PUC staff memorandum, 2019.02.12].
Mercer reports the Public Utility Commissioners were not receptive to this request. I really can’t figure why Xcel has to take money away from any customers who deserve it. Instead of playing sneaky shell games with money before it reaches customers, it looks like Xcel will have to bite the bullet and balance its books up front.
Cory wrote:
Some Xcel Energy customers got lower tax refunds than they expected. No Excel customer got a tax refund because customers don’t pay taxes to Excel.
Excel refunded utility payments because Excel’s income taxes went down.
The only thing that involves Trump and Noem in this is they lowered C Corporation rates.
Thanks to them poor people are paying less for utilities.
There should have been a space after the first sentence.
Cory DID NOT write “No Excel customer got a tax refund because customers don’t pay taxes to Excel”
Xcel’s customers pay Xcel’s taxes. The short term tax reduction from last year will quickly be absorbed by higher taxes next year. Hold on to your rebate (If you get one. I didn’t.) You’ll need it when rates return to status quo, as Trump is indicted for Russian collusion.
“Wow”. Excel is a piece of work. 2005 pled guilty to charges relating to 5 deaths in a hydropower facility in Colorado, and in 2011 threatened Boulder power consumers and mayor because the city was considering creating a municipal utility instead.
Nice skill set Jason (sarcasm)
Xcel
Xcel failed to take account of proper disposition of nuclear waste, thus DOE required this settlement which corporation executives, lawyers and accountants are struggling with devious subterfuge to short circuit the constomers. Utility lawyers, like mining lawyers, make notorious amounts of wriggling and late night mental contortions and schemes to make their money representing this type of regulated corporate client.
Perhaps our nuclear scientist on the blog can assure us of the ethical pains they take fulfilling corporate energy goals.
Hipster Kocienda developed Apple autocorrect and issued a vanella apology. Wring his neck for me please. I will no longer correct miss posts.
Hi Leslie,
I don’t have any financial ties with Xcel, but a few of my students have completed internships at Xcel facilities and others are working there. I oversee the Minor in Nuclear Engineering at SDSU, and Xcel operates nuclear power plants in Minnesota. Sometimes they hire engineers and physicists with a nuclear background.
I am teaching the Nuclear Engineering course and the nuclear lab course this semester. We are doing the introductory experiment on radiation shielding this week.
Several utilities, not just Xcel, sued the federal government regarding costs of storing nuclear waste at their facilities (which they passed on to their consumers in the form of a fee). This includes temporary storage in water and then storage in dry casks. The latter is fine, but it does take space and personnel to do the necessary monitoring and maintenance.
Essentially the government promised they would take it to a permanent underground storage facility, and they never did. In part because Yucca Mountain did not move forward, but the base reason is successful political resistance to the generation of any centralized nuclear waste storage facility.
Meanwhile, we are fine with billions of tons of coal fly ash with radioactivity levels that are considered to be safe. Technically wastes from renewables are radioactive as well due to naturally-occurring Carbon-14, Potassium-40, and uranium/thorium decay chains, but those levels are considered safe as well. The current methods of storing waste above ground in concrete and steel casks cuts down on the radioactivity via shielding so that levels are similarly safe.
Likewise the transport of said waste would be done safely….a truckload of bananas is going to emit more radiation than the waste canisters, and nobody is shutting down those bananas ;^).
The utilities won their lawsuit. I think some of that could/should be returned to consumers. You really need an economist to get into the nitty-gritty of regulated markets and the ethics that corporations tend to follow.
But at the end of the day similar utilities to Xcel want to recoup their costs and make some profit. If you are against corporations making a profit, then that is not going to be what you want to hear (sorry!). Nuclear plants in general pay their employees well, the labor is typically unionized, and they contribute in many ways in the local communities.
Ironically, those who have championed and achieved the shutdown of a nuclear plant now enjoy higher electricity prices to replace the nuclear energy, reduced property taxes and jobs for the communities surrounding said plant, fewer high paying jobs, more carbon emissions, and a de facto nuclear waste storage facility because there is nowhere else to put the waste. So if we are going to talk about ethics, let’s not forget the ethics of nuclear opponents delivering those particular outcomes.
Hi Doc! Utmost respect. Thanks for the generous post. Patently Xcel monopolistic behavior here is unethical for profit. Highest level of professionalism required. The reason is that there is not a waste method that was available when use of fuels occurred. Cart before the horse. The industry has to have the complete cycle before profit drives production. Political resistance is a natural reaction to dangerous profiteering. We need nuclear power but we need acceptable waste solutions. DOE’s promise to carry that side of the cycle is an industry corporate cop out. Politicization is the Republican 3 member monopoly—I mean PUC commission which often favors profit over protection. This example of PUC staff is laudatory. Wonder how long they will keep their jobs under this reigning GOP administration? Just my opinion. Not only do corporations deserve profit, they also deserve jail.
The waste storage method of keeping them at the plants is sufficient for now, it just would be better if the waste were isolated somewhere else in a centralized location.
Currently the once-through cycle is cheaper (i.e. use it, and then throw the remainder away). But it only stays cheaper until you have to build multiple Yucca Mountains to store the waste product in its current form. By that I mean that it generates more heat than a recycled waste would, so that you require more space between vessels for cooling by convection of the air.
We are certainly free to go about our lives without access to on-demand energy. We can spend the money to use wind and sun and storage, and go without when they are not available. But it costs less to get our energy from a utility, and Americans like access to energy when they want to use it. So if you get it from a utility, you start needing corporate entities who try to maximize their profits.
Utilities that generate wind and solar energy are also interested in making profits, but they cannot generate income to pay for construction, operations, and maintenance while the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine…..or when there is no demand at the time that the wind blows or the sun shines. That’s where their need for subsidies originates.
Xcel Energy by the way also relies upon wind and natural gas, with a growing list of solar projects in the mix. Are they only greedy corporate titans when they generate nuclear energy ;^)?
And I do like the cart before the horse analogy…examination of the forces between the horse, cart, and the earth is common in problems related to Newton’s Laws ;^).
I wish that wind and solar had a similar interest in having their waste management in place prior to the upcoming expansion…there is no cost recovery at the moment that is built-in….regardless of what approach will ultimately be used.
Let’s understand how that promise to take the nuclear waste off the hands of the utilities came about. That promise was extracted through the lobbying of…drum roll…THE UTILITIES. The utilities wanted the federal government to take their high-level waste off their hands. It was a reasonable request, since that had been an assumption in most of the utilities’ history with nuclear power. And it was the expectation that the federal government would at some point take over that high-level radioactive waste for security reasons. The timeline had always been a negotiated issue, but what the utilities wanted was a quick and dirty dump site so they could pretend the waste issue was settled. And that interest dovetailed with the interest of politicians to pretend that Yucca Mountain was a safe site, so that their own states wouldn’t be called on to host a high-level dump.
Up until Yucca Mountain was designated as the site, there had been a very careful period of research on each of the several disposal mediums at several different sites. The utilities wanted that cut short, because they thought the public relations benefit of pretending the issue was solved was better than actually solving it.
And it storing it longer on their property would encumber them to spend money, which they would pass along to consumers.
The waste issue has been entirely solvable for some time…but not politically. Transportation from the utilities to a site like Yucca (even if were not Yucca) would be and has been opposed. Recycling would be more expensive than direct burial, but in the long-term is the better path to reduce wastes and recoup more of the energy we are now throwing away, and that has also been opposed.
Opponents do not want a site to be approved because it would foster the growth of nuclear energy instead of their favored sources of energy. To generate the energy that people actually use, they have been fine with more coal being burned.
We’ll see if the latest proposed method of nuclear waste storage that is an alternative to Yucca Mountain will be supported or opposed.
That proposes the use of oil and gas drilling techniques to place packages in certain locations deep underground far away from water resources in a preferred geology without the excavation or people needed by Yucca. So it may actually cost less.
And it would facilitate the retrievability of said waste for transport to a different location or for recycling which borehole disposal method may not have (we don’t know because one would need to prove a capability to drill both deep and straight). That should satisfy Donald, as it would allow a community to withdraw their consent in the future….but it probably won’t ;^).
It would also permit facilities to perhaps locate the waste deep under the current facility as well, as long as the geology and water table issues work out. That should get around his objection of having wastes delivered to communities that did not use the energy.
Such methods may also find use for isolating toxic elements that are found in solar or wind wastes (like arsenic, cadmium, etc.), or other wastes generated during natural gas fracking needed to support renewable energy today.
Speaking of nuclear power–>
“some in a White House marked by ”
‘chaos, dysfunction and backbiting’ sought to circumvent national security procedures to push a Saudi deal that could financially benefit close supporters of the president.”
https://goo.gl/H1BUaA
Yeah, Flynn was trying to give nuclear power info to the Saudis. Maybe we can give MBS our nuclear waste. He’d probably weaponize it and Lying Lunatic would be so jealous!
Yes, Saudi Arabia is selling their oil and building solar and nuclear for the future.
If they are interested in nuclear energy only (particularly nuclear technology from the United States), they will sign a 123 agreement. If they want to leave open the possibility of enriching uranium to weapons grade, they will not. Stay tuned.
The “Green Revolution” was stalled out almost completely in 2009 due to cheap oil. That has always been the practice to curtail renewable energy. By oil gluts, it is easy to say, why would we even think of doing something when we have oil that is dirt cheap. History repeats itself and we are too damn dumb to understand the manipulation. Xcel will simply go to the PUC and ask for a rate increase….and get it.
You either need energy storage, carbon capture, or nuclear energy to reduce carbon when using renewables to match supply with demand. Requiring carbon capture for using any fossil fuel (including natural gas backup for renewables) would not make them as cheap….and the costs would be passed along to the consumer.
Perhaps they’ll bring back The Borehole. #4Science.
Jason, Excel is a is a Microsoft product, Xcel is an energy company. Under Trump, my taxes have increased, I’ll be paying in significantly. I work with many people whom you would label “poor” and their energy costs, healthcare costs, basically every basic necessity has increased under Trump, Noem and every other dipstick under the GOP moniker. Get a clue.
RJ,
I know the difference and Leslie does also. Do you really want to get into that?
Why did your taxes go up?
Are you one of those people who have State and house taxes more than 10K?
If they are, then you are the rich person Cory wants to steal money from.
Gas and natural gas are dirt cheap now.
Health insurance skyrocketed after Obamacare for the low to middle class who chose to keep their insurance.
You are the one that doesn’t have a clue.
I will be happy to link to evidence to back up my statements if you need it.
Do you want me to point out Cory’s posting mistake I saw tonight?
Sorry, I will not because I am not a person like you.
The only people paying more taxes under the new tax law are rich people.
It’s hilarious seeing liberals mad that rich people are paying more taxes.
If you want to see what is required regarding a 123 agreement with a non-nuclear state, see https://fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RS22937.pdf.
-> safeguards on transferred nuclear material and equipment continue in perpetuity
-> IAEA safeguards are applied
-> nothing is used for any nuclear explosive device or for any other military purpose
-> there is no retransfer of material or classified data w/o US consent
-> physical security on nuclear material is maintained
-> there is no enrichment or reprocessing by the recipient state of transferred nuclear material or nuclear material produced with materials or facilities transferred w/o prior approval
-> storage of uranium and plutonium is pre-approved by the US in advance
-> any material or facility produced or constructed via special nuclear technology is subject to the agreement
They make a point that this does not restrict enrichment and reprocessing altogether…just on any material that is transferred.
Congress must review any Section 123 agreement.
Dr. McT lists the requirements for an agreement for the US to assist in building nuclear plants in a non-nuclear state. None of that is required to build wind or solar facilities with US assistance. We should be exporting wind and solar technology, if we export anything. Really, what we should do is build our own wind and solar infrastructure to Make America Great Again.
Rather than export anything, whether nuclear, wind, solar or weapons, to the Saudi regime we really need to change our policies with respect to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a state that uses terrorism. It is engaged in terror in their war in Yemen, resulting in massive civilian deaths and Saudi-sponsored efforts to starve civilians to death. Needless to say, they dismembered a dissenting journalist to carry the pieces of his body out of Turkey in suitcases. This is not a state that we should look to for export of anything at the present time.
So, solar and wind have a fee structure for decommissioning of solar/wind farms and any waste management to prevent the spread of heavy elements into the water supply or other harsh chemicals? And I fail to see where the oversight is regarding any redistribution of naturally-occurring radioactivity that may occur.
Wow. The lack of such oversight is not cause for celebration, and is not an enviable attribute. Let’s have more wind and solar, but at least do it the right way.
Yes, that would make solar and wind more expensive upfront, but would take care of environmental concerns in the couple hundred year time frame. Is it worth it to pay more to be green?
I would agree with Donald on one point, that we should be making solar, wind, energy storage, and efficiency technologies and selling them to the world (as well as helping with waste management issues).
But where we disagree is that I think we should be selling (and overseeing) nuclear energy technologies and providing expertise in safe operations too. Better us than China and Russia.
Oh great. Russia and China are set to build nuclear plants in India and Argentina.
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/India,-Argentina-further-cooperation-in-nuclear-en
My wife and I signed a memorandum of understanding many years ago. That is as far as it went. We both try to understand one another, most of the time she fails. It may not be too long before we see the fruits on nuke energy between India and Pakistan. Hard to make bombs from solar or attack with wind turbines.
But you can dump the waste into a water supply….but I guess clean water isn’t important in India or Pakistan. As long as our yard is perfect and green, who cares.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/virginias-uranium-mining-supreme-court_b_5c3cf295e4b0db05608354ce
Spotus to decide if Virginia can ban uranium mining or if fed statutes reign soopreme.
They quote a National Academies study of uranium mining and its effects from 2012. It sounds like a lot of this regards open pit uranium mining.
Most of the health effects would come from Radon. Radon likes to cling to dust and smoke, so to the extent that there is dust, diesel smoke, and miners smoking cigarettes, you may have a 1 + 1 = 3 kind of situation with regard to negative health impacts.
If you could mine/process with wind and solar energy, then a lot of those effects based on smoke would go away. Then you could also mine the critical elements for wind and solar energy in open pit mining the same way. Those mining activities also release Radon in the course of mining and use chemicals in processing.
The report provides the following guidance:
*Plan at the outset of the project for the complete life cycle of mining, processing, and reclamation, with regular reevaulations (…I need a Cory Heidelberger umlaut here).
*Engage and retain qualified experts.
*Provide meaningful public involvement in all phases of uranium mining, processing, reclamation, and long-term stewardship.
I would include a thorough environmental monitoring program as well.
Sounds like good principles to follow for any mining, including that required to supply the critical elements for solar and wind energy.
Xcel isn’t talking about new nuclear as far as I know, but they want to keep the current nuclear going as they transition to more renewables in their portfolio….most of their new energy will be wind energy.
https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/business/energy-and-mining/4507668-nuclear-wind-energy-growing-part-energy-mix-xcel-says
“The company plans for its Prairie Island and Monticello nuclear plants to continue to provide at least a quarter of its generating mix through 2030 as renewable energy replaces coal and natural gas plants. The goal is to reach 85 percent carbon-free energy generation by 2030.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-07/xcel-ceo-says-nuclear-power-is-key-to-meeting-goal-to-cut-carbon
“An early retirement of those[nuclear] plants would totally set us back,” he said. “If you are shutting down your coal fleet, it’s pretty hard to shut down your nuclear fleet at the same time and still offer reliable power to customers.”
Utilities in the Southeastern U.S. tend to have more nuclear in their portfolios because they do not have the same wind resources.
There has always been some push in Minnesota to shut down Prairie Island. It ebbs and flows but has been very quiet for many years. It seems like Minnesota’s very active environmental groups have become accustomed to it, or, more likely, they’re too busy fighting that planned copper/nickel mine on the edge of the BWCA and a planned pipeline through fragile habitat.
Personally, I’m okay with Prairie Island, but appalled by the BWCA mine.
Or they are doing a good job at addressing those environmental concerns.
In theory, both reactors would have been replaced by something newer by now, but it has been more effective to upgrade them for the foreseeable future. They are actually generating more clean electricity than they initially were due to power uprates.
Shutting down the reactors would cause problems. Either the delivery of electricity would become unreliable, or more carbon would be emitted by natural gas or coal.