
Artist rendering from the Chickahominy Power LLC website.
by Steve Haner
Should there be retail choice for natural gas? The developers of a proposed natural gas-fired merchant electricity plant are testing the waters with a proposal to bypass their local monopoly supplier by building their own one-customer pipeline to another source.
In the electricity arena, this is an old issue as large industrial or commercial uses have agitated for the right to seek lower-cost competitive suppliers to Dominion Energy Virginia or Appalachian Power Company. The battle has raged at the General Assembly and in front of the State Corporation Commission.
Under state law a large-enough customer can opt out of the monopoly power company under certain conditions. Similar mega-customers exist in the natural gas arena, but there is no comparable provision in state code allowing them to choose alternative gas suppliers.
The proposed Chickahominy Power LLC plant in Charles City County, which will also be ready to burn hydrogen to produce electricity if and when hydrogen is available for that, has many certificates and permits it needs from the state. The war on fossil fuels crowd did its best to block the permits but has failed, so far.
It also has a wholesale market for the 1,650 megawatts of electricity it will produce, and in general the expansion of merchant generation not built and controlled by the monopoly utilities is considered an economic boon. The 2020 Clean Energy Economy Act, among many other things, will require the use of more purchased power agreements by the utilities.
What Chickahominy lacks at this point is an agreement with Virginia Natural Gas, service which might require a new 24-mile connection. This was to be one of two such plants in Charles City served by a planned expansion of the VNG pipeline in Virginia, but that project was mobbed by environmental opposition and abandoned by the utility last year. Continue reading →