Electrical Generation

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    Study Finds Dire Consequences if New England Pipelines Not Built

    dire consequencesThe New England Coalition for Affordable Energy, a pro-fossil fuel group backed by business groups and unions in throughout all six New England states, issued the results of a study they commissioned that asks the question, What will happen in New England if energy infrastructure, like natural gas pipelines, does not get built? The study, titled “The Economic Impacts of Failing to Build Energy Infrastructure in New England” (full copy below), finds the impacts–if these projects are not built–are dire: Electric ratepayers will pay $5.4 billion in higher electricity costs; 52,000 private sector jobs will be lost; household spending will go down a collective $12.5 billion; $9 billion of investment and 115,600 jobs that would have been created by such projects will never happen; and the list goes on. Here’s the announcement and summary of the findings, followed by a full copy of the study…
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    Hawaii Swears Off Natural Gas – Aims to be 100% “Renewables” by 2045

    no LNGThe idiotic governor of Hawaii, David Ige, recently signed legislation that will bankrupt his state down the road. Ige, with an irrational hatred of fossil fuels, including clean-burning natural gas, signed a bill in June that requires the state to use electricity derived 100% from so-called renewable sources by 2045–just 30 short years from now. This week Ige said that does not include the use of natural gas. Good luck with that. Germany is trying to transition to 100% renewable electricity and their electric rates are through the roof, stifling business and driving companies out of the country because they can’t afford to operate there. That’s the future for Hawaii. In particular Ige dissed LNG this week saying that even though it’s cheap and getting cheaper, “it is a fossil fuel.” There you have it. Fossil fuel prejudice on full display. We once coined the phrase “fracking derangement syndrome” or FDS for anti-drillers in the northeast. Seems to fit Gov. Ige too. Here’s the thing: the pen Ige used to sign the bill into law was made from and with the use of fossil fuels (plastics). His clothes? Made from plastic fibers, i.e. fossil fuels. The shoes on his feet? Partially made out of fossil fuels, and the energy used to make them came from fossil fuels. Same for the chair he sat in, the desk he used, the cameras snapping his picture, the car he drove to work, the materials used to build the governor’s mansion…all done with fossil fuels. It is IRRATIONAL to hate and restrict the use of fossil fuels because of an idiotic belief in man-made global warming. When will people like Gov. Ige wake up? His dangerous and twisted belief has just sentenced Hawaii to become little more than a third world country economically. Hopefully a future governor will reverse course…
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    PA Ethics Commission Clears Jessup Council to Vote on Electric Plant

    approvedAs MDN has previously chronicled, Chicago-based Invenergy hopes to build what will be the largest (to date) electric generating plant in the state of Pennsylvania powered by natural gas (see Public Hearing on NEPA Proposed Marcellus-Powered Electric Plant). Invenergy hopes to build the 1500-megawatt plant in the borough of Jessup (Lackawanna County), near Scranton. The project its wacko opponents, some of whom make some outrageous claims (see Gas-Powered Electric Plant to be Built “on Thousands of People”). However, the project continues to hum along. In April, local utility UGI announced they will upgrade existing and build new pipeline to feed the plant (see UGI to Feed Jessup, PA Electric Plant with Marcellus Shale Gas). One of the remaining hurdles is a vote by Jessup Borough on zoning for the plant. That vote will take place tonight. In advance of the vote, two of the borough council members asked the PA ethics commission to render an opinion on whether or not it’s OK for them to vote on the measure. The Ethics Commission gave them a green light…
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    OH Electric Generator Cuts Residential Sales in Favor of Shale

    President Obama’s war on coal, and indeed all fossil fuels, is affecting electric utility companies. But not all electric generating companies are suffering–at least suffering from loss of profits. One such company, American Electric Power (AEP) from Ohio, made more profit in the second quarter of 2015 than it did in 2Q14–$40 million more. And they did it while shutting down enough coal-fired electric plants to serve 5.5 million homes across the Marcellus/Utica region. Who cares if there’re rolling blackouts because Obama’s war on coal is causing electric plants serving residential homes to shut down, right? How does AEP actually make *more* money when up to 5.5 million potential customers are now not being served with electricity? By swapping out electricity sold to residential customers with selling to a different kind of customer: the natural gas industry itself. AEP has added a number of new customers in the oil/natural gas industry, like compressor stations…
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    Moundsville (WV) Electric Plant on Schedule for 2018 Opening

    Since April of 2014, MDN has written about and monitored a new project to build a $615 million electrical generating plant in Marshall County, WV that will burn Marcellus Shale gas (see MDN stories about it here). Called Moundsville Power, the project received a final green light in February 2015. We also discovered the plant will burn not only methane, but ethane as well (see WV Moundsville Electric Generating Plant to Burn Methane + Ethane!). Moundsville Power continues to make progress. Project developer Andrew Dorn says they expect to break ground in early 2016 and have the new electric plant operating by June 2018…
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    Star Trek Actor with Upstate NY Home Speaks Against Power Plant

    James Cromwell as Zefram Cochrane
    James Cromwell as Zefram Cochrane

    Oh darnit…Don’t tell us Zefram Cochrane is against a new clean-burning natural gas electric plant too! Who’s Zefram Cochrane? He’s the fictional creator of the warp drive that powers star ships like the Enterprise in the Star Trek pantheon of television and movie series. Actor James Cromwell played Cochrane in the 1996 movie Star Trek: First Contact. (Yes, we’re big-time Trekkies!) Cromwell, also known for his role as Farmer Arthur Hoggett in the 1995 movie Babe (he was nominated for an Academy Award), was born and raised in Manhattan and maintains a summer home in upstate New York in Orange County, near Middletown. Cromwell is a big-time liberal–someone who thinks upstate should be the personal playground for rich, New York City libs, kept pristine from any kind of development. In other words–keep the poor folk poor in upstate so the rich folk from the city can enjoy their weekends unmolested by the noise of trucks and bulldozers. And therein lies our distress. We like Cromwell’s acting, but not his acting when he attended a court hearing in Orange County last week to lend his voice and his fame to an effort to stop a proposed Marcellus gas-fired electric plant planned for the Town of Wawayanda, near Cromwell’s summer home…
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    New NatGas Powered Electric Plant Coming to…Rhode Island?!

    Yet another new electric generating plant that will use abundant, cheap and clean-burning natural gas to power it was recently announced in…Rhode Island? Yep–Rhode Island, the socialist paradise on the East Coast. Home to old money and people who oppose change of any kind. At a big ceremony last week none other than RI’s Gov. Gina Raimondo joined the CEO of Invenergy to announce the Clear River Energy Center–a 900 megawatt electric generating plant that runs on natural gas. The new plant will lower RI residents’ electric bills by a collective $280 million and replace aging coal and oil power plants–cleaning the air in the process. With the jobs created, the investment in the facility, and lower electric rates, it’s calculated this single plant will have a $1.3 billion impact on the economy of RI. Now if we can only get either the Kinder Morgan’s Northeast Energy Direct or Spectra Energy’s Access Northeast pipelines built…
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    Moody’s: NatGas Will Trump Coal & Nuclear in PJM Electric Auction

    Increasingly the natural gas and electricity markets are becoming bosom buddies. Why? Because natural gas is displacing coal and even nuclear power as the preferred fuel to power electric generating plants. This is a profound change happening right now–important for you to understand as it will play a key role in new markets for Marcellus/Utica Shale gas now and into the future. Lesson #1: PJM Interconnection is a regional transmission organization (RTO) coordinating the movement of wholesale electricity in all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia (essentially Appalachia). PJM’s electric transmission grid covers all or parts of: Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. Electricity moving through those areas is coordinated by PJM–meaning new electric generating plants that get built, or existing plants that get upgraded/converted to burn other fuel sources, must go through a PJM approval process. From time to time PJM conducts capacity auctions to increase the amount of, and reliability of, electric supply for the grid. PJM is currently conducting such an auction, and according to a new research report from Moody’s Investors Service, coal and nuclear electric generating plants will likely lose out to natural gas-fired electric plants thanks to the low price of Marcellus Shale gas…
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    NatGas Gensets Market Worth $147B Over Next 10 Years

    Just when you think you’ve heard all of the various markets where natural gas is used, markets that will sop up the huge increase in supply we have, you hear of a new one. At least, it’s new to us. On MDN you’ve read many times about electric generating plants that burn natural gas to generate electricity (see our list of stories here). There is another, similar, market called natural gas gensets, or generator sets. Essentially gensets are smaller electric generating “plants”, from 15 kilowatts to 20 megawatts in size, used by homes, businesses and utility companies. Many times gensets are used as backup and standby generators (think backup generator at your local hospital where power interruption is literally a life or death situation). Navigant Research has just published a report that estimates the market for natural gas gensets will expand to $147 billion (yes, billion) over the next ten years. Looks like big backup generators are going natgas!…
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    Lancaster Coal Burning Electric Plant Adding Marcellus NatGas

    We often hear about, and report on, new electric generating plants being built that will use Marcellus (or Utica) Shale gas. Panda Power, Invenergy and others are building plants around Pennsylvania to take advantage of cheap, abundant and clean-burning Marcellus Shale gas. What you don’t hear often, but is equally as important, are existing coal plants converting to burn natural gas. The “much-maligned” Brunner Island coal-fired power plant on the edge of Lancaster County, PA is one such plant. Brunner Island will keep its coal burning operation at the plant–for now. They are, however, spending $100 million to add natural gas burners to help drive the plant’s three electric generators. This is an accelerating trend with electric generating plants across the country, particularly in the northeast…
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    The Rotten Core of Obama’s Clean Power Plan: Global Warming Myth

    The uber-arrogant Barack H. Obama and his bullying Environmental Protection Agency have given us an untenable Clean Power Plan that a) guts the rest of the coal industry, and b) sets its sights on gutting the natural gas industry, for power generation, too (see Obama Stabs Natural Gas Electric Plants in Clean Power Plan). The core tenant/religious belief perpetrated by Obama is the myth that mankind’s burning of fossil fuels, with an increase in carbon dioxide, is leading to a catastrophic warming of the earth’s atmosphere. There is no credible scientific proof for such a theory–it’s only a theory. But that doesn’t stop Obama and his minions from using it as an excuse to shut down legal and legitimate businesses that use fossil fuels to generate electricity. Since global warming jiggery-pokery is central to Obama’s Clean Power Plan, we thought it would be instructive to show you the headlines from six years, in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The headlines then, as now, blare that we have “just five years left” before it’s “too late”. We’re now six years later without the beseeched onerous policies and guess what: We’re no worse off today than we were then. The planet didn’t get warmer (and hasn’t for 18 years now). In fact, the global warming meme has been circulating for 100 years (see Global Warming Meme has Been Around Nearly 100 Years). Today we bring you a guest blogger that illustrates the falseness of global warmers’ claims by comparing their predictions from six years ago (that didn’t come true) with their predictions now…
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    Anti-Drilling Pittsburgh Newspaper Backs Obama Plan to Dump NatGas

    Once again the editorial writers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette slavishly support anything Barack Hussein Obama does–including his plan to dump natural gas use for electric generating plants in his recently released Clean Power Plan (see Obama Stabs Natural Gas Electric Plants in Clean Power Plan). Their default assumption is that mankind, by burning fossil fuels, is causing a catastrophic warming of the the earth–a silly notion proven wrong by science. But actual facts don’t matter anymore (really, when did fact EVER matter to liberals?). They continue to hum the mantra–humans are evil, they cause global warming. And so B.H.O.’s plan is better than nothin’ according to the wizards of smart at the Post-Gazette…
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    PA Gov Wolf Salutes Obama, Eagerly Buys into Clean Power Plan

    On Monday President Obama and his rogue Environmental Protection Agency made another power grab, infringing on our freedom and liberty, with the release of a so-called Clean Power Plan (see Obama Stabs Natural Gas Electric Plants in Clean Power Plan). As we pointed out, natural gas use in electric generating plants is one of the casualties in Obama’s latest “brilliant” strategy, much to the consternation of those in the oil and gas industry. But two very important people in Pennsylvania love Obama’s overreach–America’s most liberal governor, Gov. Tom Wolf, and his minion PennFuture Sec. of the Dept. of Environmental Protection, John Quigley. They think Obama’s Clean Power Plan is just dandy–and they intend to plunge Pennsylvania down the same rat hole Obama is taking the rest of the country…
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    UGI Provides Update on PennEast & Other New PA Pipeline Projects

    During the AmeriGas Partners quarterly analyst conference call yesterday, Pennsylvania utility giant UGI Corporation CEO John Walsh gave an update on several projects of interest for those in the PA Marcellus Shale. Oh! We should point out AmeriGas is the country’s largest propane company and a subsidiary of PA-based UGI, which is why Walsh was on the call. And what did he say? Walsh provided an update on UGI’s $60 million project to build a new LNG production plant in Wyoming County, PA (see UGI Building LNG Plant in NEPA, Local Marcellus Gas to Feed It). He also spoke in glowing terms about the PennEast Pipeline and how he sees that project unfolding (it should be operational by late 2017). Walsh also updated analysts on several pending pipeline projects that will feed electric plants being built in the Marcellus. Here’s what he said yesterday…
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    Obama Stabs Natural Gas Electric Plants in Clean Power Plan

    backstabberYesterday our glorious Dear Leader, Barack Hussein Obama, made his final push for total (clean) dictatorial power. And since Republicans in Congress have lost their courage and their way, he’s likely to achieve it. Yesterday the Obama administration unveiled its Communist Clean Power Plan, a plan that illegally violates just about every Constitutional freedom we have left in this country. You see, our Dear Leader believes in the fairy tale of man-made global warming–even though it doesn’t exist. And he’s using that belief to not only screw the coal industry, he’s also using it to screw the shale energy industry too. Surprised? We aren’t. We’ve told you for years that Obama’s actions speak much louder than his words when it comes to shale energy–of his lack of support for shale energy. Now his words are matching his actions. Obama abandoned his words of support for natural gas in unveiling his so-called Clean Power Plan that will result in not only coal powered electric generating plants closing in large numbers–but will also put natural gas fired plants on the endangered list too. Lord Obama now touts so-called renewable energy only. No more talk about using natural gas as a bridge fuel. That’s verboten. Instead of letting the free market choose which power source it wants for energy, Lord Obama has made the decision for us. Sieg heil, Obama!…
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    PennEast Changes Route Where it Crosses Appalachian Trail

    This story is cool on many levels. Score another PR victory, and another clever re-route, for the PennEast Pipeline. PennEast, you may recall, is a $1 billion, 110-mile, 36-inch diameter natural gas pipeline that will run from Luzerne County, PA to Mercer County, NJ. It is vigorously opposed by Big Green groups like the nutty Sierra Clubbers and THE Delaware Riverkeeper. Some who oppose it have threatened violence (see today’s companion story). Why? Because the PennEast will flow that evil, nasty fossil fuel called natural gas. Can’t have that, you know. PennEast has made a course correction that is sure to cut down on the time it requires to get approved. The course correction is where the PennEast will cross the Appalachian Trail in Carbon County, PA. The course correction also lets the PennEast deliver cheap Marcellus Shale gas to a new electric generating plant being built by the Blue Mountain Ski Resort…
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