Details on Newly Announced Trumbull Energy Center Electric Plant
Yesterday MDN ran an important story about 10 proposed (or already under construction) Utica Shale gas-powered electric plants planned for Ohio (see List of 10 Utica-Powered Electric Plant Projects Coming to Ohio). Tucked in the list of 10 projects is a brand new project, officially announced just yesterday, in Trumbull County. MDN readers already know about this project. Last June, Massachusetts-based Clean Energy Future broke ground on their $800 million, 940-megawatt Utica gas-fired electric plant in Lordstown (Trumbull County), OH (see Lordstown Energy Center Breaks Ground on $890M Electric Plant). Construction is under way and the plant will go online in 2018. In February of last year, MDN reported that the owner of the Lordstown Energy Center project, Clean Energy Future, was considering building a second plant at the same site (see Lordstown, OH May Get Second Utica Gas-Powered Electric Plant). The rumor was correct. In November, one of the companies partnering on the project, Fluor Corporation, spilled the beans and announced the second power plant, to be called the Trumbull Energy Center, would indeed get built. However, the project’s main sponsor, Clean Energy, has been mum on the project–until now. Yesterday afternoon the project was officially announced. We have the particulars on this new, second power plant that will be bigger than its older twin…
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The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is fresh out with analysis of wholesale electricity prices in 2016 and finds electric prices were down for the year primarily because of the low price of natural gas–and the switching currently under way from coal to natgas. EIA says for the first 10 months of last year electric generating plants paid an average of $2.78/Mcf (thousand cubic feet) for natgas–down 17% from the same period in 2015. Because of the ongoing switching from coal to natgas, EIA says electricity generated from natgas power plants rose 6% in the first 10 months compared to the same period a year earlier. The truly astonishing factoid from EIA: “Natural gas was the primary source of U.S. electricity generation (when measured on an annual basis) in 2016 for the first time.” Here’s the full EIA analysis…
In April 2016 MDN told you about the Guernsey Power Station–a new Utica/Marcellus natural gas-fired electric generating plant proposed for Guernsey County, OH (see 
In September MDN wrote about a new natural gas-fired electric plant being planned for Chesapeake, Virginia (see 
We’ve written plenty about President Obama’s so-called Clean Power Plan (CPP), introduced last summer, a plan to force electric generators to convert to using more “renewable” sources of energy–and less fossil fuels (see 
Natural gas and wind are the lowest-cost technology options for new electricity generation across much of the U.S. when cost, public health impacts and environmental effects are considered. So says a new research paper released by The University of Texas at Austin. Researchers assessed multiple generation technologies including coal, natural gas, solar, wind and nuclear. Their findings, as depicted in a series of maps illustrating the cost of each generation technology on a county-by-county basis throughout the U.S., are featured in a new white paper titled “New U.S. Power Costs: by County, with Environmental Externalities” (full copy below). What’s interesting to us is who helped fund the research. Two organizations helping pay the bill were the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation and the Environmental Defense Fund. That is, those with a bias against fossil fuels. We wonder if they’ll ask for their grant money back? Here’s a summary of the research, followed by the full report…
You hear a lot about wind these days, not so much about solar, as an alternative to nasty fossil fuels like natural gas. But is wind really “all that?” We spotted an Associated Press story bragging about “the nation’s first offshore wind farm” opening off the coast of Rhode Island. Deepwater Wind built five turbines producing 30 megawatts of electricity (enough electricity to power 17,000 homes) 3 miles off Block Island–at a cost of $300 million. That’s about $10 million per megawatt to construct the facility. Let’s compare that to building a natural gas-fired electric plant. Natgas plants cost about $1 million per megawatt (10x less). This past year the very first built-from-scratch natgas plant built to use Marcellus Shale gas, called Panda Liberty, went live (see 
FirstEnergy, based in Akron, OH, is one of the nation’s largest investor-owned electric systems, serving customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York. FirstEnergy owns a variety of regulated and non-regulated power generation plants. In November the company announced it wants to sell six power generating plants in PA, four of them natural gas-fired plants (see 
In June Talen Energy announced that one of its coal-burning electric generating plants, located in Montour County, PA, will get an upgrade to burn natural gas in addition to burning coal (see 
Contrary to the assurances of charlatans like Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey who tells us new natural gas pipelines are not needed, New England is once again looking down the throat of potential electricity shortages this winter–if we have another winter like that of 2013/2014. ISO New England Inc. (ISONE), the electrical grid operator in the region, issued a statement last week to say they are implementing a 2016-17 Winter Reliability Program to guard against potential electricity shortages because there’s not enough natural gas in the region to power electric plants if much of that gas is also heating homes and businesses on cold days. According to ISONE, “Electricity supplies should [not a reassuring word] be sufficient to meet consumer demand for electricity in New England this winter.” They then go on to say, “but constraints on the region’s natural gas pipelines could pose a challenge to reliable operations.” In other words, if it gets really cold and snowy, we’re screwed. So, to fend off that screwing, ISONE has devised a program to load up on oil, of all things, and LNG, to help produce electricity if natgas runs short. Don’t say we haven’t repeatedly warned New England that without new pipelines they will not only continue to pay 4x what everyone else pays for electricity, at some point there just won’t be enough fuel sources to produce electricity and sooner or later New England will have brownouts and/or rolling blackouts–because THEY’RE FOOLS and continue to reject safe, reliable natural gas pipelines…
Over the past two months Panda Power Funds has brought online the first two built-from-scratch-to-use-Marcellus-gas electric plants, both in northeast Pennsylvania (see