Bethlehem Marcellus-Fired Power Plant Kept PA Lights on During Xmas
In a modern twist on an old story, the little town of Bethlehem (this one in Pennsylvania) provided a savior this past Christmas–in the form of a natural gas-fired power plant. The Bethlehem Energy Center, owned by Calpine, received permission (indeed, strong encouragement) from the U.S. Dept of Energy (at the request of the PJM grid operator) to “ramp up production” of electricity while other gas-fired power plants that are part of the PJM system began to fail due to the super-cold weather. Bethlehem powered up, keeping the lights (and heat) on Christmas Eve. Otherwise, Pennsylvanians living in the Lehigh Valley would have frozen their derrieres off. Marcellus gas as savior. Has a ring to it, eh?
Read More “Bethlehem Marcellus-Fired Power Plant Kept PA Lights on During Xmas”
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. In December 2021, MDN told you that TVA is spending over $1 billion to replace six coal-fired plants with natgas-fired turbines (see 
James Daly, vice president for energy supply at New England’s largest electric utility, Eversource, recently delivered some blunt truth to regulators in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Daly told them if they want to lower the insanely high price of electricity in the region right now, in the short term, they need to import more foreign LNG, which is high-priced too. But not as high as burning oil (see 
It’s that time of year. Typically at the end of a year, or the very beginning of a new year, publications will pontificate on what they predict will happen in the coming 12 months. We’ve seen a number of such articles about the energy space, including some predictions targeted specifically for the Marcellus/Utica. We’ve selected three such articles to share with you–all of them from authors and publications we highly respect.
We came “this close” to a major electricity blackout in New England over the Christmas break, during the bomb cyclone cold snap called Winter Storm Elliott. The ONLY thing that prevented a major blackout (with people freezing to death) was…oil. Fuel oil, specifically. So-called renewable energy–solar and wind–bombed out during the bomb cyclone. Natural gas did what it could, but there wasn’t enough natgas to keep the power generators turning because people like newly-elected Gov. Maura Healey (Massachusetts wacko leftist) blocked new natgas pipelines during her tenure as the state’s Attorney General. What was left was to burn to keep the lights on and to keep people from freezing to death was fuel oil (much dirtier than natural gas). Welcome to the leftist utopia of New England. During the next bomb cyclone, New England may not be so lucky.
The Freeport LNG export terminal, located in Quintana Island, Texas, has been offline and not producing LNG since early June due to an explosion (see 
Last week PPL Corporation subsidiaries Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Company announced a plan to replace 1,500 megawatts of aging coal-fired generation (nearly one-third of Kentucky’s coal fleet!) with two 621-megawatt natural gas combined-cycle units along with several unreliable, intermittent solar projects. The coal-fired plants are due to be retired by 2028.
The Rice boys–Dan, Toby, and Derek–have done it again. Yesterday, the Rice boys’ second publicly traded shell company (or SPAC), called Rice Acquisition Corp II, announced it is acquiring NET Power–an electric power developer with revolutionary new technology to capture every last molecule of carbon dioxide from natural gas-fired power plants. The deal values NET Power at $1.46 billion. Existing shareholders, including Occidental Petroleum, Constellation Energy, and Baker Hughes, will roll their existing equity into a new public version of the company. Both the Rice boys and Oxy will contribute another $100 million in equity each. When the deal is done, the current CEO of NET will retire, and Dan Rice will take over as CEO.
In April, the New York State Assembly passed Assembly Bill A7389C. In June, the New York State Senate passed the same bill, sending it to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk for a signature (see 
The same three radicalized environmental groups that previously attacked the Renovo Energy Center (REC), a Marcellus gas-fired power plant planned for Clinton County, PA, are at it again. On November 22, the Clean Air Council, PennFuture, and the Center for Biological Diversity (all completely radicalized fossil fuel bigots) announced they had appealed an extension of time for an air pollution permit granted to REC by the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP).
Two separate but related cases concerning Pennsylvania’s entrance into the interstate carbon cap-and-trade program known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which we call a carbon tax, had their day in court yesterday. Judges from PA’s typically conservative Commonwealth Court heard oral arguments and, according to leftists, zeroed in on the issue of whether the so-called RGGI “fee” assessed by the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) is really a fee, or instead is really a tax. It makes a difference. The DEP can, constitutionally, assess a fee, but it cannot unilaterally slap a new tax on coal- and natural gas-fired power plants (as it is trying to do).