In a surprise move, Dominion has put its controversial & ginormous Brayton Point coal-fired power plant in Somerset up for sale. No immediate word on any potential buyer or what it means for the plant’s future.
The most comical part of the Fall River Herald News article on the sale is Dominion CEO Tom Farrell dropping every Craigslist cliche to try to fluff up the plant. Low mileage! Barely used!
But the most telling line for Massachusetts’ energy future comes later:
Despite Dominion spending more than $1 billion in new equipment to comply with federal environmental guidelines, Brayton Point was declared the worst emitter of greenhouse gases in New England and New York by the Environmental Protection Agency last January.
Even a billion dollars can’t buy you “clean coal”, a lesson many communities across America are learning the hard way.
Is this Obama’s way of putting an industry out of business? No worries, you can have on of the many minimum wage jobs being created, because that’s all there is for most people.
Sure, close the plant down, not like MA has the highest electric rates in the nation. Oh wait, scratch that. What the heck, feels good to think we are doing something about climate change, holding back the oceans, slowing the rate of the melting Martian icecaps too!!
If I was governor, that plant would be in full throttle operation, 24/7. It looks a hell of a lot better than the junkyard Cape Wind will turn Nantucket Sound into.
MA has 71,000 clean tech jobs, more than coal mining does in all of Appalachia. Try another one, governor.
dan, we;re creating jobs in domestic oil, natural gas and (as pointed out above) “clean energy”. Like Domain’s Salem coal plant, I’m confident the Somerset plant will be converted to natural gas. Why do you favor a plant that spews so much soot that is coats nearby homes? (I don’t know if Somerset did, but I know the Salem plant was and it appears that Somerset was as dirty.
dan, why do you support an energy source that is clearly so unhealthy for people living nearby? (I’m not talking “global warming”, I’m talking breathing in soot). Given there are cleaner and cheaper alternatives, why are you advocating for this industry. Are you suggesting government support for this industry to save their jobs, compared to increased domestic jobs in gas, oil or the bio-fuel I buy from USA producers? Or are you advocating for “full throttle” emission of soot. Given your last sentence, you apparently think a coating of soot on neighbors is sound public policy.
Every year the plant would whitewash my grandmas house to cover the spot. It got better when they switched to a mixture but the houses in front of the plant were in such danger they bought the property and knocked them down. I really hope it’s shut down for good and I can’t believe Keenan is putting corporate interests in front of his residents.
First of all, know where Brayton Point gets its coal? Hint: not Virginia. In a 2010 study, it was detailed that about 85% of the money spent on coal for Brayton Point came from Columbia. Not that place in Ohio… the nation in South America.
Secondly, Massachusetts doesn’t have the highest electric rates in the nation. That is, unless like you, like many tea baggers, don’t think of Hawai’i as part of America. Their residential rates are on the order of $0.36/kWh, about twice what we in MA pay. Connecticut and New York also have higher rates BTW.
Thirdly, Brayton Point is contributing to climate change, twice as much per kWh as a combined cycle natural gas plant contributes.
Fourthly, if you were governor, you’d be exhibiting quite a bit of hubris. After all, Brayton Point is a privately owned merchant plant, and you’ve got no right ordering a private company to operate their company in a particular way. Furthermore, Brayton Point, from Jan-Jun 2012 (the most recently available month of data is June), the coal-fired portions have been operating at 15% operating capacity. Amazingly low. As far as I can tell, it’s not because it was broken; it’s because it was simply not needed most of the time. That is, for most of the first 4380 hours of the year, Brayton Point’s electricity was *more expensive* than the alternatives necessary for supply to meet demand. If you, as governor, required Brayton Point to operate “at full throttle”, you’d be a fascist with a poor financial understanding of the electricity market.
So dan, once again, I must ask: why in God’s name do you just spout stuff out when you clearly have no idea about what you write?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022903390_pf.html
I found this informative: It would seem that getting coal to be clean is quite expensive. Likely some kind of investment by government will be necessary to kick start it, to take it out of “imaginationland” as you put it.
Market forces are making coal unaffordable and gas cheap. No one’s questioning that (Commonwealth mag). But are we giving the communities that host these coal plants, or their neighbors, any ability to weigh in on what the future brings? Who’s writing the future of power? The governor’s new task force, which will determine the future of coal in Massachusetts, lacks a seat for the public.
Check out the Coal Free Massachusetts response to the sale. Coal is unviable for our economy, our communities, our health. We need to plan ahead and do so now: before we’re stuck with a dangerous mix of shuttered plants, unfunded tax bases, and – for plants that do survive – the deadly remnants of dirty power.
@Dan two comments
-1)the most expensive electricity is in IL, our taxes are also worst-I cant emphasize how much I miss living in a well managed state like MA
-2)coal-I for one would love to have clean coal but the free market you and your fellow libertarian/republican/independents/whatever Dan needs to be this week believers cannot sustain it or that other beloved nuclear energy. Both would need to be subsidized to high heavens and make Solyndra look like a small scale investment. The future is in clean burning, American made natural gas in the short term and biomass, fuel cells, wind, and solar in the future. Honestly clean coal is the worst kind of Soviet style socialism-propping up an antiquated industry and product the market doesn’t want to ‘save’ jobs nobody actually wants to do (give them a choice and they’d do anything else) and protect connected oligarchs, Its time we transition away.
I think Obama should work with WVA and other coal states on a transition plan to get those workers into new professions asap, its also getting far more dangerous to mine coal-notice how accidents are a lot deadlier and more frequent in just the past decade. Partly because mine safety was entirely decimated under the last President and partly because its just more dangerous to dig deeper since thats where the reserves are. .But people there are tired of getting screwed by coal, young people leave the state in droves and if educated never return, and all the pristine hunting and fishing grounds will need to be strip mined. Its time to transition the entire country away from dirty and expensive coal and find a way to get these regions back on their feat with new industries. MA should partner with the state since we transitioned to a post-industrial economy rather well. There was a time when Kendall Square was all smokestacks and factories-even when my mom was a kid, and maybe WVA can be another life science capital.
the land is permitted for electrical generation and there’s roads and transmission lines in place.
We’ll find out what it’s worth when it sells.
Which is what is being floated as the “asking price.” Why? Well, the capacity factor for the plant Jan-June 2012 was about 15%. The way to think about it is this: it was economic to run the plant at full capacity about four hours each day, *OR* to run it at half-capacity about eight hours per day. The rest of the time — nothing.
It’s perfectly OK to have low capacity factors. On-shore wind is often about 30%, PV in this area is about 17%, and peaking plants are often as low as 1-3%. However, given that coal plants are very inflexible, their usefulness in maintaining supply-demand matching typically relies on them operating many hours of the day — 50% for smaller plants, more like 75% for plants the size of Brayton Point. That Brayton is operating at something like 15% suggests that it’s economic value is way less than $600M.
Keep in mind that about $1.0B was put into this plant over the past decade.
Sure, one could build a pair of large combined cycle natural gas plants there — and that would certainly happen before they were built on a greenfield site. My bet is that a transition of the site to a double 3xCC won’t be complete until 2017 or later.
In the mean time, every time we as a region install more wind turbines, more PV panels, and implement more energy efficiency, we reduce Brayton Point’s capacity factor from 15% to something lower. That means we’re reducing the emissions of CO2, Hg, PM2.5, PM10, NOx, SO2, and assorted other chemicals which lead to injury and death.
If it’s running at 15% capacity over several months, couldn’t that mean that its off for days or even weeks at a time? Or perhaps it’s just running at 15% all the time? Any way you slice it, that’s a very low number, but running it 4 hours per day seems like it would be absurdly inefficient.