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Biden EPA Delays New Gas-Fired Power Plant Regs to Post-Election

The Bidenistas at the EPA announced last night the agency will delay, until AFTER the November election, implementing harsh new regulations aimed at closing down gas-fired power plants across the country. The unstated purpose is to remove this highly unpopular edict as a campaign issue so the bag of bones known as Joementia can try to get himself reelected. We suppose this is good news, as it means these regs will likely never get implemented for existing power plants — they will certainly be dropped in a DJT administration. Still, the threat looms over the industry, and nobody will build a new plant under these harsh regulations, which WILL apply to any new gas-fired power plant project effective immediately. So all work on new plants will stop forthwith. That’s the downside to the announcement.
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Ameren Announces Plan for Gas-Fired Peaker Plant in St. Louis

A rendering of Ameren Missouri’s planned Castle Bluff project. The natural gas plant would be in south St. Louis County. (click for larger version)

Ameren Corporation, a regional electric utility, currently produces two-thirds of its electricity using coal-fired power plants (and almost no gas-fired plants). By 2045, the company plans to have no electricity produced by coal, with unreliable renewables making up most of the mix. The unreliable renewables need a backup — natural gas. The company recently firmed up plans to build one of two new gas-fired power plants. Ameren’s Castle Bluff Energy Center will sit at the confluence of the Meramec and Mississippi rivers near St. Louis, MO, next to where the former Meramec Energy Center burned coal for decades.
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SC PSC Approves Gas-Fired Power Plant Proposed for Edisto River

On Feb. 15, members of the South Carolina Public Service Commission approved a proposed project to build a 1,020-megawatt (MV) gas-fired power plant in the state’s Lowcountry, in Colleton County. The project is a 50/50 partnership between Dominion Energy (formerly South Carolina Electric & Gas) and Santee Cooper (South Carolina’s state-owned electric and water utility). In a typical knee-jerk reaction, several Big Green groups are opposing the plan, in particular because of a pipeline that will need to be built to deliver Marcellus/Utica gas to the plant.
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Clean Energy Future Sells Lordstown Power Plant to ArcLight Capital

In June 2016, Massachusetts-based Clean Energy Future broke ground on an $800 million, 940-megawatt Utica gas-fired electric plant in Lordstown (Trumbull County), OH (see Lordstown Energy Center Breaks Ground on $890M Electric Plant). The plant was completed and went online in October 2018 (see Lordstown (OH) Energy Center Now Online, Generating 940 MW). In 2019, the super-efficient, low-emission plant won an award from POWER Magazine (see Utica-Fired Lordstown Energy Center Wins POWER Mag Top Plant Award). And that’s all we had heard about that project, which continues to hum along, producing electricity for 850,000 homes. Until now.
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2.4 GW of Gas-Fired Power Retiring in 2024, Incl. Boston’s Mystic

The number crunchers at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) published a post yesterday highlighting that in 2024, some 5.2 gigawatts (GW) of U.S. electric generating capacity will be retired. It is the least amount of capacity being retired since 2008, in the past 25 years. The graphic the crunchers used is somewhat stark and misleading. It shows the number one category of retirements is natural gas power plants, retiring 2.4 GW (46% of all retirements). What you don’t discover until deep into the post is that a single gas-fired plant, Boston’s Mystic Generating Station, which has been online since the 1940s (!), represents 1,413-MW (60%) of the gas plants retiring.
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TVA Issues Final EIS for East Tenn. Power Plant, Moving Forward

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally-owned electric utility corporation in the U.S. TVA’s service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. TVA is the sixth-largest power supplier and the largest public utility in the country. Last May, TVA announced that it would convert the Kingston Fossil Plant (coal-fired plant) in East Tennessee to a natural gas-fired plant capable of generating 1,500 megawatts of electricity (see TVA Proposes NatGas Power Plant, 122-Mile Pipeline for East Tenn.). The project also includes contracting with Enbridge to build a new 122-mile pipeline. Last Friday, TVA issued an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the project and announced it has decided to move forward with building the project.
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Tenaska Buys 6 Northeast PA Gas-Fired Power Plants from IMG

Tenaska, one of the largest privately operated companies in the U.S., announced it has purchased six 21-megawatt (MW) natural gas power plants in Northeast Pennsylvania from IMG Energy Solutions. Tenaska currently operates approximately 22,000 MW of natural gas-fueled and renewables electric generation. We don’t know where the time has gone, but the last time we wrote about IMG was nearly seven years ago! MDN first told you about IMG (then called IMG Midstream) in August 2014 (see 7 Small Marcellus-Powered Electric Plants Coming to NEPA). At the time, IMG was proposing to build seven “tiny” natural gas-fired electric plants — each plant producing on the order of 20-22 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 13,000 homes. IMG added a couple more plants to their plans in November 2014 (see Details on IMG’s “Tiny” Marcellus-Powered Electric Plants in NEPA).
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EIA Predicts NYMEX Henry Hub to Average $2.40/MMBtu in Feb/Mar

Once a month, the analysts at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) issue the agency’s Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), their best guess about where energy prices and production will go in the next 12 months or so. We sometimes poke good-natured fun at the EIA because their predictions go up in one month, and in the next month, they go down, etc. What about the latest STEO dart board, published yesterday? It won’t surprise you to read that due to warmer weather, the EIA prognosticators believe the average Henry Hub natural gas spot prices will remain “subdued” around $2.40/MMBtu in February and March. What about for the entire year?
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Big Green Gears Up to Oppose Duke’s NC Gas-Fired Power Plants

Duke Energy is a Fortune 150 company headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., and is one of America’s largest energy holding companies. Last summer, Duke announced plans to build a new gas-fired power plant in Person County, NC. The company recently announced it wants to double it — build a second big gas-fired plant at the same location (see Duke Energy Seeks to Build 2 Massive Gas-Fired Power Plants in NC). Both proposed plants would generate 1,360 megawatts (MW) of electricity each, and both would eventually be able to run on hydrogen or a gas/hydrogen mix. Big Green is beginning to pitch a fit…
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PA & OH Lawmakers Meet re Avoiding Grid Catastrophe from Renewables

Last Thursday, members of the Pennsylvania Senate, including PA State Sen. Gene Yaw, and members of the Ohio General Assembly met in Columbus for a hearing on energy reliability, sustainability, and affordability. The hearing consisted of two panels, one focused on state and national energy impacts and another on consumer and generational impacts. PJM, the organization that manages the mid-Atlantic power grid consisting of 13 states and the District of Columbia, testified. Indeed, the main thrust of the meeting seemed to be how to keep the growing PJM grid from crashing into blackouts because of an overreliance on unreliable renewables like solar and wind.
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NJ Considers Constitutional Amendment to Ban New NatGas Power Plants

Natural gas-fired power plants in the Garden State of New Jersey provide roughly half of the electricity used by NJ residents. Yet NJ’s Democrat politicians are proposing to put a measure on the fall ballot to amend the state’s constitution to make it illegal to build any new gas-fired power plants in the state. Can you believe it? Are they stark…raving…mad? They might as well say they’re going to ban electricity!
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Duke Energy Seeks to Build 2 Massive Gas-Fired Power Plants in NC

click for larger version

Duke Energy is a Fortune 150 company headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., and is one of America’s largest energy holding companies. Duke’s electric utilities serve 8.2 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, and it collectively owns 50,000 megawatts of energy generating capacity. Duke’s natural gas unit serves 1.6 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, and Kentucky. The company employs 28,000 people. Last summer, Duke announced plans to build a new gas-fired power plant in Person County, NC. The company just announced it wants to double it — build a second big gas-fired plant at the same location.
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Pittsburgh Airport NatGas Microgrid & Two Others Sold for $165M

In early 2013, the Pittsburgh International Airport and Allegheny County, PA, signed a deal with CONSOL Energy (now CNX Resources) to lease 9,000 acres surrounding the airport for natural gas drilling (see $50M Check in the Mail: Pittsburgh Airport Lease a Done Deal). The airport added an electric microgrid that burns Marcellus gas from airport property, and since July 2021, the airport has produced all of its own electricity (see Pittsburgh Airport Now Generates All Its Power Using Marcellus Gas). The microgrid was built and is owned by the utility company Peoples Gas (now called Essential Utilities). Essential announced yesterday it is selling the airport microgrid and two other microgrids it owns in the Pittsburgh region to Cordia for $165 million.
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PA Bill Mandates 30% of Electricity Come from Solar/Wind by 2030

Whenever the government mandates which energy sources residents can and cannot use, residents lose. The government’s micromanaging of energy is a prescription for high prices and supply chain failures (i.e., blackouts). Yet leftists like Pennsylvania Rep. Danielle Friel Otten (a radical Democrat from the Philadelphia area) never seem to learn. She introduced a bill, House Bill (HB) 1467, that requires 30% of all electricity used in the state to come from unreliable renewables like wind and solar by the year 2030 — six short years from now. It is a prescription for massive failures in the power grid in the Keystone State.
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U.S. Southeast Requests More Marcellus/Utica Gas for Power Gen

Here’s the reality. People are moving out of states like New York due to high taxes and the stripping away of freedoms. Those of us living in NY now live in virtually a Communist state (and we’re not exaggerating). We can’t choose our energy sources. We can’t even use single-use plastic bags at the grocery store! NY has fallen. But NY’s mass exodus is the gain of states in the Southeastern U.S. Florida is the number one destination. Also high on the list are North Carolina and Georgia. With the increase in population, and the rapid influx of new business, and the push to convert automobiles to use electricity instead of gasoline, utility companies in the Southeast are asking (more like begging) for permission to build new natural gas power plants to meet all of the new demand for electricity. Of course, the extra gas somehow has to get to the plants.
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FERC Approves 32-Mile Cumberland Pipeline to TVA TN Power Plant

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is the sixth-largest power supplier and the largest public utility in the country. In 2021, MDN told you that TVA is spending over $1 billion to replace six coal-fired plants with natgas-fired turbines (see TVA Investing $1B to Build New Natgas-Fired Electric Plants). In late 2022, TVA recommended moving forward with replacing one of the six — a coal-fired plant located near Cumberland City — with a natural gas combined-cycle power plant (see TVA Recommends Replacing Cumberland Coal Plant w/Natural Gas). Last Thursday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a certificate of public convenience for Kinder Morgan’s Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP) subsidiary to build the Cumberland Project, a pipeline to feed the TVA’s proposed Cumberland gas-fired plant.
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