Plants

Florida Power & Light Co. (FPL) said it will replace two aging natural gas-fired generation plants with a solar-powered battery system that the utility claims will be the world’s largest — four times the capacity of the current largest solar-powered system.

It’s been in the works for a decade now, but the result of California’s ban on the use of seawater to cool a series of mostly natural gas-fired coastal electric generation plants is expected to have an impact on the state’s carbon footprint in the decade to come.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a rule Tuesday that would shift to states much of the responsibility for regulating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plants, potentially opening a door to increased burning of coal, in the Trump administration’s latest maneuver to kill the Obama-era Clean Power Plan (CPP).

New domestic natural gas-fired generation, along with some renewables, will replace the power supply lost with the retirement of 35 GW of coal-fired and nuclear generation plants over the next five years, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

United Kingdom-based Velocys plc has suspended its venture into the nascent small-scale gas-to-liquids (GTL) space in favor of becoming a renewable fuels company focused on biomass-to-liquids (BTL), electing to put proposed projects that would have used shale gas — like one in Northeast Ohio — on hold indefinitely.

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.

Natural gas deliveries to power plants in the PJM Interconnection have dropped by around 1.3 Bcf/d over the last two weeks due to spring maintenance outages, according to natural gas analytics firm Genscape.

A coalition of environmental groups is going to court to challenge recently approved changes to PJM Interconnection LLC’s capacity performance rules, claiming the updated model for incentivizing reliability disadvantages renewables in favor of fossil fuels.

Increasing natural gas production, particularly from shale plays in the Northeast and Southwest, is expected to boost gas-fired power capacity across the country in the coming years, especially in some Mid-Atlantic states, Texas and Florida, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).