The Tennessee Valley Authority, America’s largest public utility, has decided to build a new natural gas plant to replace some of its coal generation.
The Environmental Protection Agency isn’t happy.
The TVA plans to retire the first of two coal-burning units at the Cumberland Fossil Plant near Cumberland City, Tennessee, by the end of 2026. [emphasis, links added]
The proposed 1,450-megawatt natural gas plant would be up and running before then.
“The EPA issued a response to the analysis stating that TVA relied on “inaccurate underlying economic information” and “may continue to underestimate the potential costs of the combined cycle gas plant and overstate the cost of solar and storage,'” reports AP.
The agency also said that the TVA used a “misleading” metric to show that renewables are more expensive than natural gas generation and failed to consider the opportunities presented by the Inflation Reduction Act’s provision of $375 billion over 10 years for clean energy projects.
It is unclear if the EPA has suggested any physically or financially sound solutions to wind and solar’s intermittency and dispatchability problems.
“Replacing retired generation with a natural gas plant is the best overall solution because it’s the only mature technology available today that can provide firm, dispatchable power by 2026 when the first Cumberland unit retires – dispatchable meaning TVA can turn it off and on as the system requires the power,” TVA’s president and CEO Jeff Lyash said in a statement.
Read more at Grid Brief
“Replacing retired generation with a natural gas plant is the best overall solution because it’s the only mature technology available today that can provide firm, dispatchable power by 2026 when the first Cumberland unit retires – dispatchable meaning TVA can turn it off and on as the system requires the power,” TVA’s president and CEO Jeff Lyash said in a statement.
What more fundamental truth does he need to tell?
I’d love to see the actual numbers the EPA suggest are representative of stand alone renewables compared to stand alone CCGT. THe physics of energy density and the cost of battereis to fill that gap means they cannot have any such figures, so its pure assertion, the physics says NO,
An EPA appears to have no idea the living environment is built of CO2. That Life on earth is carbon-based. That it is made entirely – EVERY SINGLE SPECIES – of little carbon sacks of water called cells. That life’s most important metabolic process is photosynthesis – a metabolism nearly as old as life itself. Photosynthesis’s formula is sunlight plus CO2 plus H2O, painting the world green with its green-pigmented enzyme chlorophyll. Incorporating the carbon from CO2 into our carbon-based life (2nd most abundant element in every species). (The most abundant element is H2Oxygen). Converting sunlight energy into the high energy bonds of sugar. Freeing life from its likely warm alkaline shallow water vent beginnings. And as a bonus providing EVERY molecule of the oxygen animals need to breathe! That a planet without CO2 is a dead planet. That life was born about 3.8 billion years ago when the atmosphere had life luxuriant CO2 concentrations more than twenty times those of today. And it has been dangerously and inexorably declining ever since. DECLINING to within 30ppm of the beginning of the death of all things FROM A LACK OF CO2! Now tell me, EPA, how is the reversal of the dangerous decline towards a lack of CO2 oblivion a negative thing for the environment? Why are you letting your misanthropic attitude misconstrue fossil fuels recycling of dangerously low levels of CO2 as a bad thing? Here’s Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace… https://www.prageru.com/video/the-truth-about-co2
Climate change activists would say replace the coal plants with wind and solar power. After all, what could go wrong? We can answer that by looking at regions that have done so. California now imports 30% of its power from its neighbors. When Germany retired their nuclear plants the plan was to replace them with renewable energy. They were forced to build/reactivate coal power plants to make up for the short fall. The energy crisis in Europe and their dependence on energy from Russia is caused by attempting to rely on renewable energy.
Screw the EPA its just another buracracy under the Democrats like it was under Clinton a bull in a China Shop