Turning the Corner on Coal-Fired Power?

Last month, Lowbagger had an article about the cancellation of 59 coal-fired power plant projects in 2007. The article, which links to an entry in Sourcewatch, lists several reasons including concerns about climate change, coal being taken out of regional long-range integrated resource planning (whatever that means), renewable energy playing a more important role in utility profiles, and plants cancelled due to market forces (community or regulatory objections, lack of demand, excessive costs or lack of financing).

Champagne corks may be popping at this news, but I prefer to wait until I start seeing carbon dioxide concentrations trending downward in the atmosphere before getting too excited about this outcome. Beyond compiling the list of projects, Sourcewatch didn’t provide a lot of commentary, which meant that if I wanted to read any further exploration on this topic, I was going to have to write it myself.

“Cancellation of 59 plants” isn’t a terribly significant fact by itself. It doesn’t directly reflect carbon emissions averted; after all, the power generation is going to come from somewhere, and the replacement sources won’t entirely be renewables. However, it might be an indication of a trend. Earlier this month, the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) published a report (actually, a wordy Powerpoint presentation) summarizing the status of new coal plant starts in the U.S.

One tidbit from this report is that 36,000 megawatts of coal-fired plants were commissioned in 2002, while only 4,500 megawatts of capacity were built by 2007. Project delays have shifted some plants out several years. Delays and cancellations have occurred due to regulatory uncertainty regarding climate change, or unfavorable economics brought on by increasing industry costs. The drought in power plant construction reduces the skilled labor available for engineering, procurement, project management and construction; if you can’t find work designing and constructing coal-fired plants, you find something else to do and therefore are less available if future projects are announced. The reduction in available human resources further reduces the viability of bringing more new coal plants on line.

The NETL report indicates that projected growth rate in electricity generation has been declining, which some parties (i.e. the North American Electrical Reliability Council) suggest that electrical generation capacity might become inadequate to maintain reliability and to keep electricity prices from rising. What do these folks (i.e. NERC and NETL) suggest? Why, build more coal-fired plants. The outcome if that doesn’t happen is an increase in the use of natural gas for electrical generation, and with concerns about natural gas resources, there might an increase in liquid natural gas imports.

And, while noone responsible for writing these assessments has said it, you might as well get ready for the climate change skeptics to chime in, “and then the terrorists win, because we’ve given them an opportunity to blow up Boston Harbor”.

In these reports, there hasn’t been any mention of renewable energy or conservation picking up the slack in electrical generation needs. But that’s perhaps because the NETL is oriented towards fossil fuel generation. It would be interesting to see what the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) says about all of this.