About a year ago the writer put up BLOGs concerning the use of “fracking”—(fracturing) shale to release captive CH4 or NG i.e. natural gas. Wednesday, September 12, 2012, WSJ carried an article entitled “Coal-Fired Plants Mothballed By Gas Glut”. In its heyday, the giant W.H. Sammis power station was a workhorse, cranking out electricity around the clock. But FirstEnergy Corp. now plans to idle the coal-fired power plant on the Ohio River and run it only when there is exceptional and extended need for electricity.
Coal has been losing ground to natural gas ever since a boost in shale-gas production sent the price of natural gas tumbling starting about 4 years ago. But now the natural-gas price advantage is beginning to affect the coal units that seemed most protected by any shift. Many of these plants have the latest environmental upgrades (EPA) and are often close to coal deposits. Sammis is one of a growing number of coal-fired plants that were built to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but now may run only occasionally because of softening demand for electricity. Gas-fired plants are cheaper to run and cleaner to operate. BTW according to the article it takes about 4-days to completely shut down OR start up a modern coal-fired generation plant.
The reason: With natural gas priced below $3 per million BTU, down from about $8 in 2008, many gas-fueled plants can make electricity for about two cents (!) a kilowatt hour, less than half what it costs to run many coal units according to the director of utilities research at UBS Securities LLC in New York. FirstEnergy, based in Akron, Ohio, spent more than $1.8 billion putting pollution controls of the seven-unit Sammis plant in Stratton, its largest generating station in Ohio, starting the work before the 2008 economic downturn.
Another owner of generating plants, Dallas-based Luminant, recently announced plans to put two big, coal-fired generating units at its Monticello power plant in northeast Texas into semiretirement. A third, newer unit will continue running. Luminant, a unit of Energy Future Holdings Corp. of Dallas says the change this year is prompted by market forces (competition). This is because natural-gas plants set market prices in Texas, and their costs are so low that they can often sell power for less than what it costs to run a coal plant. Luminant claims its costs are higher because of coal handling expenses and the higher number of employees it takes to run a coal plant compared to a gas-fired plant.
“It’s all about low wholesale prices,” said the Luminant spokesman Allan Koenig. Luminant is lobbying utility regulators for creation of a subsidy for generators that would reward them for keeping coal-based generating plants standing by to create electricity if needed. (COMMENT—if we had a national energy policy such a contingency should be covered----but we don’t have a policy<frown>).
Ohio-based American Electric Power Co. started down this path a couple years ago, changing the operating status of 10 generating plants in Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia and Virginia. Today it keeps a skeleton crew at each location and brings in more workers when it wants to bring some of the coal units back on line, something that requires about four days notice, AEP’s annual coal burn has dropped from approximately 75 million tons before 2008 to a projected 55 million tons in 2010. The multistate utility’s natural-gas use over the same period has doubled to about 200 billion cubic feet.
The mothballing of coal-fired plants is in part due to the lower cost possible using NG firing and in part due to REDUCED demand for electrical energy brought about by the slowing economy. This makes the energy producers seek the lower cost of NG fuel to retain some profit from the reduced electrical energy demand. When the economy does turnaround the electrical demand will expand and it likely that coal-fired AND NG-fired generation will be necessary. (see COMMENT regards National Energy policy)
INTERESTING---
Convert them to LENR, Ni_H fusion technology instead. Units running at 1200 dec C now and in the process of certification & licensing. See Peswiki.com, ECAT.COM, defkalion-energy.com, amongst many others. We do not need Fracing, poisoned water supplies and exploding showers that go with them. LENR looks like it is set to be one of the biggest game changers on the planet and hopefully an end to the age old question of how to get the US's oil out from under somebody else's sand, without upsetting the locals.
High temp, Hot-Cat, results - work is ongoing, but looks promising :- http://pesn.com/2012/10/15/9602206_Penon_High-Temperature_E-Cat_Test-Results_Posted/
Posted by: John Haughton. MIEEE | October 16, 2012 at 06:25 AM
I hope that natural gas prices stay low, if it will benefit the economy in this way. However several people are of the opinion that the cost of natural gas is bound to go up in the next decade. What will happen then? Other options, in addition to natural gas, must be found. They must be safe and environmentally sustainable.
Posted by: Carol@coalashregulation | October 21, 2012 at 06:59 PM