Bradford County | Electrical Generation | Energy Services | Industrywide Issues | New Fortress Energy | Pennsylvania | Regulation
PA DEP Permits Gas-Fired Power Plant at Former Wyalusing LNG Site
Back in July, MDN told you that the New Fortress Energy project to build a regional LNG liquefaction plant in landlocked Wyalusing (Bradford County), PA, was dead and buried, given the company had changed its plans for the site (see Wyalusing LNG Plant is Dead; Gas-Fired Power for Data Ctr Replaces). The new plan is to build a data center at the site, along with a smallish 248-megawatt gas-fired plant dedicated to powering it. In Saturday’s Pennsylvania Bulletin, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) announced it has issued an air permit for the gas-fired power plant. Read More “PA DEP Permits Gas-Fired Power Plant at Former Wyalusing LNG Site”
Something remarkable has happened in the Pennsylvania State Senate, where Republicans hold a slim majority with 27 members and Democrats have 23 members. In an unusual act of bipartisanship, six of the Democrat Senators (26% of all PA Democrat Senators, more than one-quarter) voted with all 27 Republicans to pass a bill that would erase Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) regulations from Pennsylvania’s books. RGGI is a carbon tax on coal- and gas-fired power plants in the state. 
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 country’s sixth-largest power supplier and the largest public utility company. In May 2023, TVA announced that it would convert the Kingston Fossil Plant (coal-fired) in East Tennessee to become a natural gas-fired plant capable of generating 1,500 megawatts of electricity (see 
How many articles have we written about the connection between Pennsylvania’s ill-advised quest to become a member of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) and the high cost of electricity? Dozens of articles, for sure. Former PA Governor Tom Wolf attempted to force the state to join the RGGI carbon tax scheme unilaterally. Republicans in the Senate sued to block it, as the legislature is the proper branch of government with the power to tax, not the executive. Wolf’s successor, Josh Shapiro, appealed a Commonwealth Court decision in favor of the Republicans to the PA Supreme Court, where the case now sits, waiting for a decision (after the election). 
On September 29, some 105 Democrat state legislators from 10 states across the PJM Interconnection region released a joint letter urging PJM to take immediate action to accelerate the deployment of unreliable renewable energy projects—to favor unreliable renewables over fossil fuels. The letter, organized by the partisan left-wing National Caucus of Environmental Legislators (NCEL), highlights urgent concerns about grid reliability, rising energy costs, and recent federal actions against renewable energy. A group of Pennsylvania Republican legislators responded with their own letter asking PJM to disregard the lunatic letter from NCEL. 
Two separate reports released last week from the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), the entity in charge of the state’s electric grid, warn of coming blackouts in New York City without “several thousand megawatts of new dispatchable generation within the next ten years” added to the grid. Starting next summer, NYISO anticipates its reliability margins in NYC will be “dangerously thin,” making the grid more vulnerable to failures. This is not the first time NYISO has warned the state it’s on a razor’s edge and heading for blackouts. Yet NY’s Democrat politicians ignore the warnings and insist on pushing unreliable renewables. 
We’re not big fans of the American Petroleum Institute (API), which tends to do the bidding of the Big Oil companies that fund it. Big Oil’s aims are sometimes at odds with those of smaller, independent oil and gas producers—the innovators who discovered shale drilling. Yet there are state chapters of the API that do a good job. One of them is the Pennsylvania API chapter. The executive director of PA API, Stephanie Catarino Wissman, recently published an excellent article in Broad+Liberty that calls for fast-tracking the effort to pass federal permit reform so Pennsylvania can get back to building. 
In September, a blaming and bullying “summit” was convened by one of the biggest bullies on the political scene today, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, to complain about high electricity prices in the PJM Interconnection grid (see 
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) issued its latest monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) yesterday. The STEO is the agency’s monthly best guess about where energy prices and production will head in the next 12 months. In this latest assessment, EIA dropped its estimates for the Henry Hub spot price for 2025, again, as it has for months. The agency expects the HH spot price to average $3.40 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) in 2025, $0.10 lower than last month’s forecast (and $0.30 below the prediction from three months ago). EIA also dropped its 2026 forecast, quite radically, lowering it by $0.40 to $3.90/MMBtu. Hence, our suspicion that sometimes the data crunchers haul out the breakroom dartboard to help with forecasts. 
PJM Interconnection, the U.S.’s largest regional transmission operator, has proposed an Expedited Interconnection Track (EIT) to let large power generation projects over 500 MW bypass the grid’s traditional interconnection queue. Open to any fuel type, the EIT requires projects to be state-sponsored, seek Capacity Interconnection Rights, and achieve operational readiness within three years. Any fuel type that can meet those criteria, including natural gas, nuclear, renewables, and even battery storage, will qualify for the program. However, the reality is that natural gas is the most likely source to be built and brought online. 
In April, MDN told you about a new greenfield expansion of Kinder Morgan’s Elba Express pipeline into South Carolina to serve growing demand for natural gas in the state (see 
What is it about the modern Democrat Party that seeks the total destruction and annihilation of that which they perceive as a political threat? The party, or perhaps more accurately, the radical left elements of the party (which increasingly is all of the party), wants to destroy law and order, including our police departments. Just look at the “protests” (i.e., violent riots) in places like Portland, Oregon. Look at the violence against ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) employees in places like Chicago. And look at the dangerous talk of politicians like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who is threatening to force the state out of the PJM Interconnection electric grid (see 
Ohio State University (OSU) is constructing two natural gas combustion turbine generators and one steam turbine generator with a maximum power generating capacity of 105.5 megawatts of electricity and 285 kilopounds per hour of steam. It’s being built on 1.35 acres at OSU’s main campus in Franklin County (see