Carbon-Pros Analyst Blog

With carbon cap-and-trade on the horizon, utilities are looking into options for reducing their dependence on carbon-intensive coal for baseload power. Yesterday, the North Carolina Utilities Commission approved Progress Energy's plan to build a new natural gas-fueled power plant to replace a coal-fired plant in 2013.

The plant will be almost At 950MWs, nearly the capacity of a nuclear power plant. It will use a high-efficiency combined-cycle technology and sit on the site of the retiring coal-fired plant. The new gas-fueled plant is expected to cost about $900 million and take two years to build. The plan also will involve the construction of a natural gas pipeline to the site. Progress Energy expects to announce a contract for the gas supply in the near future.

Progress Energy's plan contrasts with moving to next-generation nuclear plants for baseload power. The next generation of nuclear plants is expected to cost at least $6 billion each, take up to ten years to build, and provide about 1300MWs of capacity.

If analysts are correct that North America has at least 100 years of non-conventional natural gas reserves, this strategy makes a lot of sense. Natural gas plants emit about half the carbon-dioxide as coal plants. High efficiency combined-cycle designs such as this one emit about one-third the carbon of the older coal plants they will replace. We may need next-gen nuclear plants as a bridge to the future when renewables can provide baseload power, but this model suggests that natural gas can also provide part of that bridge. Diversity in the U.S. fuel mix makes sense as a hedge against future uncertainties.

Source: EnergyCentral, Progress Energy