Client: Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC)
Authors: Joshua R. Castigliego, Jordan Burt, PhD, and Tyler Comings
July 2025
On behalf of the Southern Environmental Law Center, Senior Researcher Joshua R. Castigliego, Researcher Jordan Burt, PhD, and Principal Economist Tyler Comings prepared a report that evaluates four alternative portfolios to demonstrate that the continued business-as-usual (BAU) operation of Alabama Power’s James H. Miller Jr. Electric Generating Plant (also known as “Plant Miller”) is uneconomic and not in the best interest of customers.
One method of comparing alternative resource portfolios is to examine customer costs on a “levelized” basis—which normalizes total costs by total generation (in megawatt-hours or “MWh”) over an assumed time period. The levelized cost of energy (LCOE, in $ per MWh) provides insight into how each of the alternative portfolios compare to one another regardless of the total energy provided by each portfolio. Among its four modeled alternatives, AEC finds that replacing Plant Miller with clean energy and storage resources is cheaper on a levelized cost basis than keeping the plant operational into the 2040s.
Alabama Power should also continually evaluate the costs and risks of keeping the plant on-line by looking at viable alternatives. Although the alternative portfolios presented in this report are meant to be illustrative, the results of the analysis have demonstrated that the continued operation of Plant Miller (with or without carbon sequestration retrofits) is uneconomic, and Alabama Power would be able to provide customers with cost savings by investing further in clean energy resources. In order to determine the most cost-effective replacement of Plant Miller, Alabama Power should periodically conduct capacity expansion modeling that considers the retirement of Plant Miller in the context of the Company’s entire system.
