As recently as May of this year, U.S. power companies had announced intentions to build as many as 150 coal-fired power plants. But within the last few months, “plans for a new generation of coal-fired power plants are falling by the wayside as states conclude that conventional coal plants are too dirty to build and the cost of cleaner plants is too high,” reports the Wall Street Journal today in a front-page story.
Dominion, which recently highlighted plans to build a $1.7 billion clean coal facility in Southwest Virginia, appears to be an exception to the trend of canceled plants. But many of the same concerns apply: It may be possible to burn clean coal, but it’s darned expensive. (See “Another Inter-Regional Transfer of Wealth .”)
The Journal cites a controversial proposal by Northern States Power Co. to build a coal-fired plant in Minnesota. A hearing judge at the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission is urging rejection of the plan.
The judge concluded it would cost an extra $472.3 million, in 2011 dollars, to make the power plant capable of capturing about 30% of its carbon dioxide emissions, and another $635.4 million to build a pipeline to move the greenhouse gas to the nearest deep geologic storage in Alberta, Canada. Thus, $1.1 billion in pollution controls had the potential to inflate the cost of power coming from the plant by a whopping $50 a megawatt hour, making electricity from Excelsior twice as costly as power from many older coal-fired plants that simply vent their carbon dioxide.
Dominion’s proposed plant in Wise County would sequester C02 in local coal seams, sparing the cost of building a long pipeline. But the facility would still cost some 60 to 70 percent more to build than the average new coal plant.
The big question: With electricity demand soaring, what will take the place of coal? Nuclear power is the obvious alternative, but new nukes will take years to permit and build. Wind and solar offer only limited near-term potential, and don’t provide around-the-clock power. Natural gas is extremely expensive, and likely to get more expensive if the coal plants don’t get built.
Implementing conservation measures to dampen rising demand is the obvious short-term way to plug the gap in supply and demand, but current goals, if met, would conserve only 10 percent by 2020. Virginia needs to set much more ambitious electricity conservation goals and create regulatory mechanisms — smart metering, peak load pricing — to incentivize savings.
I don’t know how residential customers will respond, but I am quite certain that commercial and industrial consumers would move aggressively to cut their energy costs. I am judging submissions to the Governor’s Environmental Excellence Awards right now, and I am impressed by the ongoing programs that several of Virginia’s largest manufacturers have put into place to curb energy consumption in general, and electricity consumption in particular. As a requirement for participating in the awards, they are required to share their best practices. We can achieve dramatic savings we just put our minds to it.
