Gas-Fired

Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined elected officials in northwestern Ohio on Monday to cut the ribbon for one of the state’s largest and most efficient natural gas-fired power plants, announcing his support for the deregulated power market as other generators push for subsidies.

Despite climate change-related challenges and anti-carbon skeptics, the National Regulatory Research Institute (NRRI) and the American Petroleum Institute (API) said natural gas likely will remain an integral part of the U.S. energy mix going forward, but California regulators aren’t quite as sure.

Appalachian shale gas is reshaping North America’s largest wholesale electricity market, PJM Interconnection, in an ongoing transformation that is likely to have serious ramifications for other power generators throughout the grid operator’s footprint, speakers said during a webinar hosted by NGIearlier this month.

Between aggressive carbon-reduction measures and a ban on using coastal waters for generation plant cooling, natural gas-fired electric generation will increasingly play a smaller role in California’s power mix, executives at Edison International (EI) said Monday during a quarterly earnings conference call.

California regulators recently gave the green light to two repowerings at coastal natural gas-fired generation plants that represent a combined 1,884 MW of mostly baseload generating capacity.

The growing shift to more reliance on renewable resources for electric generation in California has put nearly 10,000 MW of natural gas-fired generation sources in a state of flux for grid planners in the state.

For a second time last month, a review committee at the California Energy Commission (CEC) gave the thumbs up to a major natural gas-fired replacement plant for an older, less-efficient thermal generating facility slated to close under the state’s ban on the use of seawater for cooling.

As an outgrowth of a phased-in statewide closure of coastal water-cooled power plants, a California Energy Commission (CEC) member on Thursday recommended approval of a natural gas-fired generation project by AES Southland Development LLC.

If all the new natural gas-fired power plants planned for this year and next come online, gas-fired generating capacity could reach its highest level since 2005, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said Monday in a Today in Energy note.