Southern Company’s Lobbying Disclosures Obscure State-Level Information from Investors, Public

Southern Company faces another challenge to improve its limited lobbying disclosures at the company’s upcoming Annual Meeting of Stockholders on May 27, according to a filing by Majority Action. Southern’s current lobbying disclosure policy allowed for secret expenditures to the Utility Air Regulatory Group, which litigated against environmental regulations. The company does not publish or report total lobbying expenditures in Alabama or Georgia despite employing almost 50 lobbyists in the two states, according to state records.

Southern Company’s low- to no lobbying disclosures have enabled lobbying activity that has been discordant with the policy objectives that the company has espoused to investors and the public. Southern has actively lobbied against environmental regulations and action on climate change at the federal level. The company’s state-level disclosures offer almost no indications of whether the company’s state lobbying follows its federal pattern or aligned with Southern’s stated corporate “low- to no-carbon” goals. Southern’s operating companies, Alabama Power, Georgia Power, and Mississippi Power have ignored the company’s “low- to no-carbon” goal, according to their own statements to regulators. 

CEO Tom Fanning frequently refers to utilities who resist technological change as trying to “keep the waves off the beach”.

Southern, however, was the world’s leading utility company opposing the Paris Climate Accord, according to a 2019 Influence Map report. The company was a primary voice denying the science of climate change via the Global Climate Coalition, the Information Council on the Environment, and funding discredited anti-climate researcher Willie Soon. Fanning previously denied the role of CO2 in climate change on CNBC. Fanning has been outspoken in his belief that Southern Company should invest heavily in government relations. 

Fanning gets credit toward bonus for coal closures after opposing federal regulations

Southern Company is frequently cited as one of the nation’s most prolific spenders on lobbying and has been one of the most vocal and steadfast utility opponents of environmental regulations and federal action on climate. Since 2010, Southern has spent more than $135 million on lobbying at the federal level, the most of any utility in the country. Southern has actively lobbied or litigated against the Clean Power Plan, Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, Cross State Air Pollution Rule, Coal Combustion Residual rules, and the Paris Climate Accord, among others. 

After opposing almost every federal initiative to reduce carbon emissions and increase clean energy, the company now claims that it has changed course, and has built additions of zero-carbon electricity and closures of coal plants into Fanning’s compensation incentive package. However, Fanning’s greenhouse gas bonus pays him for coal retirements that Southern says were caused by the very policies that Southern opposed under his leadership. In 2019, Alabama Power blamed, “federally driven environmental mandates related to coal” for the closure of Plant Gorgas, a coal-fired power plant. Alabama Power had upgraded pollution controls to the plant in 2015 for a total cost to customers of $740 million, including the company’s profit. Fanning received bonus credit for the closure of Gorgas.

Operating company CEOs, Mark Crosswhite of Alabama Power, Paul Bowers of Georgia Power, and Anthony Wilson of Mississippi Power, are not compensated for their performance toward Southern’s “low -to-no carbon” goal.

Despite its “low- to no-carbon” goal, Southern Company is actively lobbying Congress for “environmental regulatory relief, generally,” according to its first quarter 2020 federal lobbying disclosure.

Southern Relies on Limited State Filings to Obscure Lobbying

Investors have led calls for Southern Company to increase its lobbying disclosures, particularly at the state level, in light of the company’s substantial federal lobbying. The company has opposed shareholders’ calls for increased transparency. 

Southern told investors it already had “policies in place to provide transparency about its participation in the legislative process […].” Southern further claimed that it provided lobbying details to state ethics agencies, but state ethics laws in Alabama and Georgia do not require lobbyists or companies to disclose lobbying expenditures. Southern has yet to disclose total expenditures or information about its lobbying in those states.

Alabama is home to some of the weakest ethics laws in the nation. The state does not require lobbyists or companies to disclose the issue on which they lobbied, or the amount spent on lobbying. 16 lobbyists and lobbying firms worked for Southern Company in Alabama, yet no lobbyist disclosed any spending, according to Alabama Power’s first quarter 2020 lobbying report filed with the Alabama Ethics Commission.

Georgia similarly offers little detail on Southern Company’s lobbying priorities or expenditures. Georgia state law requires companies only to disclose spending on gifts to officials and public events. In 2019 and to date in 2020, Southern Company has employed 36 lobbyists in Georgia who spent almost $60,000 on food, tickets to football games, and other events with Georgia officials.

Mississippi requires that companies disclose slightly more information than Alabama and Georgia. Mississippi Power, Southern’s smallest electric operating company, spent more than $407,000 on lobbying in 2019 and more than $677,000 in 2018. However, Mississippi Power does not disclose the issues on which it lobbies, as Southern’s lobbyists do at the federal level.

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Two Controversial Virginia Gas Plants Face Increasing Uncertainty, Documents Show

Two planned gas-fired power plants in Virginia are facing growing difficulties caused in part by the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, according to recent documents filed by the plants’ developers with regulators. Independent power producers have proposed both plants – C4GT and Chickahominy Power –  which are only a mile apart in Charles City. Residents and environmental justice allies are engaged in a growing opposition to the plants, which will be built in a majority African-American and native county. 

The developers behind the two plants, which would have a combined capacity of 2,660 megawatts, aim to sell their generated electricity to the PJM Interconnection power market. C4GT first applied for a state permit in 2016, while Chickahominy Power followed suit a year later.  

Yet trouble for the projects appears to be mounting. 

Chickahominy’s Equity Issues

A recent statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by Argan Inc., whose subsidiary Gemma Power has been contracted to construct the Chickahominy Power plant, indicated that the project’s future is up in the air. “Due to several factors that are slowing the pace of the development of this project,” the company wrote, “including additional time being required to secure the natural gas supply for the plant and to obtain the necessary equity financing, we currently cannot predict when construction will commence, if at all.” (emphasis added). 

For these reasons, Argan did not include Chickahominy Power Station in its backlog list for the total value of its projects.   

The plant’s ongoing inability to secure financing has likely been compounded by its failed attempt to carve itself out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a carbon trading program Virginia recently joined. As the Energy and Policy Institute revealed in February, a bill to provide the two Charles City County gas plants with carbon allowances that would have essentially exempted them from RGGI’s trading scheme in their first three years of operation was crafted by a lobbyist for Chickahominy Power. The ensuing outrage and pressure from opponents led the bill’s sponsor, Senator Lionell Spruill, to withdraw it shortly after it passed the state’s senate.

C4GT’s “slight delay”

C4GT is experiencing its own set of hurdles. While the plant has already received all of its state permits, it still needs to secure the gas supply to fuel its turbines. Late last year, Southern Company’s subsidiary Virginia Natural Gas (VNG) began the permitting process for its Header Improvement Project, a 24-mile pipeline that will supply gas to C4GT. The project includes two new compressor stations and an upgrade to an existing one.

In recent filings to the State Corporation Commission, VNG indicated that C4GT – the pipeline’s main customer – is experiencing a “slight delay,” the exact details of which have been redacted. According to VNG’s statement, the delay is “due to uncertainty in the gas supply and financial markets caused by the spread of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19.”

In a supplemental filing last week, VNG stated that it discussed the matter with C4GT, which indicated it is still committed to the project. Yet, for the first time, VNG also raised the possibility of continuing the pipeline without the power plant. In that case, VNG said, it will “petition the Commission for an amended [application] for a project within the scope of needs of participants at that time.”

The prospective pipeline’s other customers are two local gas distribution companies, Dominion’s Virginia Power Services Energy and NiSource’s Columbia Gas of Virginia.

SAVE’s Gearing Up for a Fight

In addition to the financial markets putting C4GT in some doubt, other forces might also prevent the completion of the power plant, along with VNG’s pipeline and compressor stations. 

A recently formed coalition of environmental organizations has vowed to fight the Header Improvement Project. Concerned Citizens of Charles City County (C5), Virginia Pipeline Resisters, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Virginia’s Poor People’s Campaign, and Richmond Interfaith Climate Justice are among the groups that have joined to form the Stop the Abuse of Virginian Energy (SAVE) coalition.

In its first move, the group demanded that the SCC postpone its public hearing on the project, scheduled for May 12. “Residents in the path of this project shouldn’t also have to fear the prospect of dangerous new pipelines, gas-fueled power plants, and compressor stations in their backyards at a time when they are already facing COVID-19,” the group said in a recent op-ed. “Certainly, they cannot safely attend the public hearing in May, or attend community events to learn about the project.”

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