Natural gas and renewables climbing

EIA says these energy sources have dominated new U.S. power generation additions in the first half of 2012; gas overtaking coal

Alan Bailey

Petroleum News

Natural gas and renewable energy, especially wind power, predominated in the addition of new power generation capacity in the United States in the first half of 2012, according to an Aug. 20 report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In fact, natural gas or wind has powered most new generators built over the past 15 years, EIA said.

“In particular, efficient combined-cycle natural gas generators are competitive with coal generators over a large swath of the country. And, in the first half of 2012, these combined-cycle generators were added in states that traditionally burn mostly coal, with the exception of Idaho, which has significant hydroelectric resources,” EIA said.

Presumably, the overabundance of cheap natural gas in the Lower 48 states is also factoring into the upsurge in the use of gas-fired power generation.

Between January and June 2012 165 new electric power generators came on line, with a total capacity of 8,098 megawatts. Only one of these generators — an 800 megawatt unit in Illinois — was coal fired, EIA said.

And 105 of the new generators were small systems, commonly using solar power or landfill gas — wind generator data tend to be aggregated in the form of relatively large wind farms. Also, quite a few of the additions used combustion turbines or internal combustion engines, designed to meet peak generation needs when electricity demand is at its highest, EIA said.

The past couple of years have seen an upsurge in solar power capacity, with total U.S. solar capacity more than tripling from 619 megawatts to 1,927 megawatts since the beginning of 2010. And the stated solar capacity does not include non-utility-scale applications such as the use of rooftop solar photovoltaics, EIA said.

A total of 3,092 megawatts from 58 generators was retired in the first six months of 2012, with more than half of this retired capacity involving coal-fired plants; 30 percent of the retired capacity involved petroleum-fired plants. EIA said.

The figures for the first half of the year are consistent with a trend over the past 10 years, in which the use of coal for U.S. power generation has declined at the expense of natural gas and renewable energy. The use of hydropower, which EIA classifies separately from renewables, has remained relatively constant, as has nuclear power.