Large Crowd Turns Out For/Against 22-Mile Pipeline in NJ Scrub Pines
On Monday the New Jersey Pinelands Commission, which oversees a stand of scrub pines in South Jersey, held a public hearing to listen to comments on a plan to build a 22-mile pipeline through the scrub pines, burying it alongside the road so as to not disturb any spindly trees. The pipeline will supply clean-burning natural gas to a power plant currently fed by coal, cleaning up the air and lowering CO2 emissions. But dunderheads in the area are still opposed–largely incited by radical environmental groups like the NJ Sierra Club and the odious Food & Water Watch, who spread lies about the project. So many people turned up for the meeting, it maxed out the meeting room of 260 and some had to wait outside in the rain (which didn’t sit well with the pampered snowflakes). Predictably many who showed up wanted to go on record as opposed to the project. Isn’t that always the case? It’s easy to motivate people to attend a meeting when they’re against something–much harder to attract people who support something. At any rate, the surprising thing about yesterday’s meeting were the many people who turned out to support the pipeline. Also predictable, at least one anti (from the odious Food & Water Watch) couldn’t contain herself and had to be ejected for disrupting the meeting…
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MDN has previously reported on a $900 million natural gas-fired electric generating plant coming to Orange County, NY (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 
As we have pointed out in past articles, the electricity industry is a complicated industry, with some some power producers operating as “regulated” and some operating as “unregulated.” Regulated power producers have their rates, and rate of profit, set by government regulators–which limits profits but also guarantees profits. Unregulated power producers, on the other hand, do not have the safety net of the government forcing ratepayers to pony up–they operate in the free market, taking all of the risks–and reaping the rewards if those risks prove worthwhile. Many (most?) of the new natural gas-fired electric plants getting built, like those we have focused on in Ohio over the past several days (see 
Yesterday MDN ran an important story about 10 proposed (or already under construction) Utica Shale gas-powered electric plants planned for Ohio (see 
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