Natural Gas
Should We Try to Stop New Fossil-Fuel Plants?
Let's give credit to those who worry about how we'll get enough
electricity without building more coal or gas plants. They are pointing
to a very real threat about what happens if energy demand keeps
growing. We hear some say, if not coal, we need more natural-gas
plants. Nevertheless, they miss one extremely important fact --
in the U.S. today there are 450,000 megawatts of existing and grossly
under-utilitized natural-gas capacity.
Translation: we don’t need to build more natural gas plants
to displace coal and we don't need more coal. We already have
the ruby slippers. If operated at the 90% capacity factor some suggest,
those existing natural-gas power plants could generate 3.5 billion
megawatt-hours at an average capacity of 405,000 megawatts. This
would be over 90% of the U.S. demand for electricity (3.7 billion
megawatt-hours of energy over a year) and 63% of U.S. summer-coincident
peak demand (about 640,000 MW).
This solution to the "coal problem" — replacing existing
coal capacity with unutilized combined-cycle natural gas capacity
— was initially developed by Bill Powers. Bill's current article
"Unused Turbines, Ample Gas Supply and PV to Solve RPS Issues"
("Natural Gas & Electricity", September, 2009) is
available here
(PDF).
This solution would take Bill's thesis another step forward by
suggesting that we can use all the existing natural gas capacity
in conjunction with new renewables. The potential energy production
of existing natural-gas plants is far in excess of what allegedly
is needed. Granted, not all of those are more efficient combined-cycles,
but the fact is that the simple cycle capacity could be combined
with wind to convert it into baseload or with solar to make it more
reliable peak. Carbon benefits would be less than with combined
cycles but still large compared to using coal. In any case, these
services will be needed to some degree.
Increasing demand is a serious problem for climate protection and
for whether we can make sure we build renewables rather than new
fossil-fuel plants. That is why it is urgent that we replace
growth in energy consumption with efficiency and conservation.
The good news is that this only requires about 1.5% increment per
year of savings, which is challenging but achievable with the right
policies.
Updated 10/4/09
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