NEW ENGLAND POWER GRID OFFICIALS appear to be having little problem meeting future electricity demand, but most of the new power plants coming on line run primarily on natural gas, increasing the region’s reliance on fossil fuels.
ISO-New England, which manages the region’s wholesale electricity market, said on Thursday that an auction conducted on Monday had easily generated enough power capacity to meet forecasted demand for the period running from June 1, 2019, through May 31, 2020. The auction secured 35,567 megawatts of power capacity at a total cost of $3 billion, $1 billion less than an auction held last year for the 2018-2019 period.
The results pleased grid managers because the numbers suggest the auction process will spur investments in new power capacity as existing plants in the region shut down. Officials said 4,200 megawatts of power generation, including 680 megawatts from Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth, are expected to go off line by 2019. Participants in this week’s auction represented 40,131 megawatts of power capacity, including 6,700 megawatts of new resources.
In a statement, Gordon van Welie, president and CEO of the power grid operator, said the auction results “bode well for meeting future resource adequacy requirements.”
Approximately 89 percent of the capacity from the auction came from existing and new power generation, 7 percent from reductions in electricity demand, and 4 percent from imports. The auction produced 1,459 megawatts of new power generation, nearly all of it coming from three proposed power plants expected to be up and running in three years in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
The three new plants are all expected to operate using either natural gas or oil. Power generators prefer the flexibility of dual-fuel capability because it allows them to keep operating even if natural gas supplies run tight, as they have at times during the winter months in recent years. Under the auction process, winning bidders are penalized financially if they fail to deliver the power capacity they promised.
The low auction clearing price surprised grid operators. In fact, they said, the price was 35 percent less than what most analysts had assumed would be needed to finance the construction of new power plants.
Environmentalists have suggested the region doesn’t need new natural gas pipelines because there is already sufficient power capacity without them. But Robert Ethier, vice president for market operations at ISO-New England, said in a conference call with reporters that more natural gas is needed. “We continue to see a need for new gas infrastructure,” he said.
More than half of New England’s electricity is produced by power plants that run primarily on natural gas. Officials say that percentage is likely to increase as power plants retire and new ones are built to replace them.
The ISO’s report also placed wind and solar in the larger context of the region’s power needs. According to the auction results, large-scale solar projects will supply 65 megawatts, or 0.2 percent, of the region’s power needs in 2019-2020, while wind will provide 135 megawatts, or 0.4 percent. Included in the wind total is 6.8 megawatts from the Deepwater Wind offshore project off of Block Island, Rhode Island. The ISO report also said small-scale solar, primarily rooftop installations, helped reduce the region’s power needs in 2019-2020 by 390 megawatts.
It wasn’t always the case that generators were penalized financially when they failed to deliver the power capacity they promised. ISO New England told FERC in 2013 more than 40% of power generators paid to be available and produce electricity failed to do so 36 times over the course of the previous 3 years. That led to the changes mentioned in this article. I’d like to know exactly how the system works now but I’d really like to know who were the nonperforming generators and exactly how much did they get for not being there when New England really needed them
No one is asking why coal and nuclear power plants with more than 20 years remaining life are forced to retire early. The reason is that state mandates for renewable energy is forcing ISO-NE to acquire enough future wind and solar power to meet the requirement that 25% to 50% of our electric energy comes from renewables (wind and solar). ISO-NE calls wind and solar Variable Energy Resources (VERs). VERs have no capacity value and they are not required to be available during peak demand. As a result ISO-NE needs to have enough capacity on hand from other than VERs to keep the lights on.
VERs cannot function on the grid without an equal amount of conventional capacity to provide firming for grid balance. Operationally,the best resources for firming wind and solar are low efficiency natural gas and oil (Diesel). While coal and nuclear can also run in variable load following mode, they are not competitive as backups for wind and solar. Furthermore, the power output ramping needed for firming wind and solar increases stress, which for nuclear is very dangerous.
Bottom line, The states’ mandates for renewable energy is forcing ISO-NE to modify the market such that coal and nuclear is forced into early retirement to be replaces by fast acting, dirty natural gas and oil. Rates will be force to skyrocket, and little to no carbon will be avoided.
Tell Beacon Hill and the misguided environmental groups who are pushing the clean energy future agenda to back off, and let ISO-NE to only consider the reliable supply of electric power at the lowest possible cost. Let wind and solar compete against conventional power without politically motivated mandates.
As I understand it, the best firming resources are in fact flexible (fast start, fast ramp, low turn-down) combined cycle natural gas. Simple cycle gas turbines can prove in at lower cost, with less efficiency. Combined cycle plants are quite efficient (for example, see http://www.ge-flexibility.com); modern simple cycle turbines are somewhat less so, but far more efficient than coal and oil fired steam plants.
I agree that closing Pilgrim is a mistake, but it’s being driven out by market price of gas generation, not by an environmental agenda. I believe that ISO-NE could have refused to permit decommissioning, but has already done so.
Utility scale storage is approaching commercial viability. There is room for growth in demand response, which shaves demand peaks, and reduces need for firming resources. Presumably, ISO-NE is taking these into account in planning.
Finally, your comment ignores the elephant in the room: overwhelming evidence of anthrogenic climate change. Coal plants have to be retired, and no new ones built, unless carbon sequestration can be made to work on a utility scale. With impending retirement of the coal units at Brayton Point, on top of the retirement of Salem, there isn’t a lot of coal left in Massachusetts’ energy mix anyway.
I agree that if, or when, grid-scale energy storage becomes available that the combination of VERs and storage can compete against conventional power. However, gambling that energy storage will arrive in time to avoid a grid dominated by natural gas and VERs, is extremely risky, expensive, and will not avoid enough carbon to prevent anthropological climate change
We run a huge risk of having to adapt to climate change with a dysfunctional economy.
There is good cause for optimism on the storage front. California has a mandate for mass deployment by 2020, and if history repeats, the engineers will come through with a workable solution.
I’m not troubled by the prospect of a grid dominated by solar and wind with gas firming, along with hydro, nuclear and biomass. Particularly with rapidly declining cost of photovoltaics and with recent improvement in wind turbine reliability, cost, output and efficiency. To say nothing of growing supplies of gas. And also given that what remains of the coal and oil-fired thermal fleet is mostly long since depreciated and approaching end of design lifetime.
I’d be interested to see your justification for “extremely risky, [and] expensive… risk of… dysfunctional economy.” This flies in the face of most of the research I’ve seen.
Regions and countries that have committed to replacing coal and nuclear have some of the highest electric rates. High electric rates have a strong negative effect on the economy. In Germany, heavy industry dependent on electricity is leaving.
Grid scale storage will not only make wind and solar feasible, it will have a large impact on improving the efficiency of conventional fossil fuel power. If storage was easy, it would have been discovered by Ben Franklin.
I too have confidence that engineers will come through with a workable solution. Especially if cost is not a constraint.
Germany is a bad comparison. They committed to shut down all their nuclear capacity without having replaced it. And they’re not sitting on a pool of natural gas. All the retirements and new construction here are market driven, with a gentle push from emissions rules.
Benjamin Franklin was a genius and the greatest savant of his time. The chemistry, materials science, precision manufacturing and control systems that promise to enable economic grid-scale storage were discovered/created well after his time. It’s called progress, and Franklin would admire it.
By definition, cost is a constraint of a workable solution.
Read IEEE Spectrum. Read ISO-NE’s reports. Look at what is going on at NREL, at MIT, at Stanford. We’ve seen tangible progress in the past few years. It’s clear-eyed reality. It may not match the vision of environmentalist dilettantes, but it is a path to a reliable grid with deeply reduced carbon footprint, higher efficiency and lower cost generation.
Actually, Germany is a harbinger of our future. Germany believed that government mandates to a fossil fuel free future would let their engineering genius find the solution. They are discovering that without fossil fuel firming wind and solar have no capacity value, and they have to replace nuclear with the dirtiest low efficiency burning coal in the world. We are on a path to do the same except we will use low efficiency natural gas for firming. There will be little to no reduction in the carbon footprint, the efficiency gains from users will be reduced by the need to burn natural gas in peaking plants to provide firming for the increased capacity from wind and solar, and rates will rise to cover the increase in overall capacity needed to address peak demand.
The point of Ben Franklin is to illustrate that the quest for energy storage is as old as electricity itself. While a breakthrough is always possible, there is no reason to expect that it is eminent, and without grid scale energy storage, the success to a fossil fuel free energy future is unattainable.
State mandates by definition ignore the cost factor.
ISO-NE reports are showing a future grid dominated by natural gas with additional infrastructure, and much higher costs.