Entergy announced today it plans to shutter the aging, rickety Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth in 2019. Ironically enough considering the energy debate on Beacon Hill focuses on how to lower energy costs, Entergy cited low energy prices, along with a lack of state subsidies, in its decision to close Pilgrim:
Management cited several reasons for the decision, including low current and forecast low wholesale energy prices that are expected to lead to annual losses of more than $40 million in revenue for Pilgrim. The company also blamed state energy policy.
“When we look at energy policies in Massachusetts we see a proposed clean energy standard that excludes nuclear, a preference for Canadian hydro power and the subsidization of gas pipeline capacity through electric ratepayers, and put that all together … and it became clear to us that we needed to make the decision to retire Pilgrim,” Mohl said.
Pilgrim has a long history of safety violations and recently had its safety rating downgraded. The plant also faces added stress from warmer water temperatures being fueled by climate change. Other nuclear operators like Exelon have complained that stably-priced clean energy is hurting their ability to gouge ratepayers at peak usage times.
Here’s reaction from Sen. Ed Markey:
While nuclear energy was once advertised as being too cheap to meter, it is increasingly clear that it is actually too expensive to matter. Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station is just the latest example of how nuclear power simply cannot compete in the current energy market. And alongside the economic conditions that Entergy blames this closure on, there also have been decades-long and repetitive operational safety and security concerns with the facility that have contributed to this announcement. The remaining period of operation of Pilgrim needs to be with the utmost attention to safety and security, and must include rigorous oversight by the NRC to ensure that Entergy has and is spending the resources needed.
As the plant moves towards permanent shut down, priority must be given and special attention paid to worker assistance and transition training. The workers at Pilgrim are committed, skilled and valuable and have been an important part of economic activity in the region. The NRC must also ensure Entergy dedicates adequate financial and technical resources to remove the spent nuclear fuel from the overcrowded spent fuel pool and decommission the reactor quickly. We cannot allow the public to pay the price if Entergy comes up short on the bill to safely close this plant.
With this announcement we must also recognize that the time is now in New England and around the nation to rapidly transition towards the safe, affordable clean energy of wind, solar and geothermal power and continue to invest in energy efficiency and making the vehicles on our roads even more fuel efficient.
Finally, a big congratulations to MADownwinders.org, which has been working to highlight the plant’s safety deficiencies and force its closure.
what’s next? How long will the site have to be maintained, and how much will that cost? Who will be paying for that 50 or 100 years from now?
Can Seabrook be far behind?
I don’t know that they’ve quite got enough, or that the estimates of actual cost are accurate, but I expect that they’ll store things on site indefinitely. We’ll know more soon.
I also think that it may not actually happen. That is, I think they may not end up retiring by 2019. There will be lots of machinations between now and then.
It took 15 years to complete the decommissioning of Rowe Yankee, and there is still waste stored on the site, eight years later.
The spent rod pool will be perpetual until Yucca Mountain is opened.
Closing this power plant is going to increase the region’s carbon emissions by a fair bit. According to the Boston Globe article, this power plant is producing 84% of New England’s carbon-free electricity. It would take about 5,000 MW of solar panels to produce the same annual power output, which is about 4 or 5 times the amount currently installed in MA. And solar won’t help with the winter electricity shortages. I’m not sure we can manage to avoid building more gas pipelines unless we find a way to keep this power plant running. I suspect it is cheaper in the short term to keep it running than it is to build the gas pipeline, and it is definitely better for the environment in the long run.
At this point reverting to even more fossil fuel should not even be a consideration. We have until 2019 to build these solar and wind farms, creating quite a few jobs in the process I imagine. Sun does shine quite a bit in the winter.
A decade ago, our peak electricity demand was in the summer on hot days. For the past few years, our peak electricity demand has been on cold winter nights. We have already installed enough solar that we have to shut off power plants in the summer, so more solar doesn’t reduce the amount of fossil fuel generating capacity that we need.
The capacity problem that New England has had for the past few winters is that the gas pipelines aren’t big enough to provide all the gas we need for heating and generating electricity when it is really cold out, especially at night. There are three possible solutions to this: 1 – reduce the heating load, 2 – build more non-solar, non-gas power plants, 3 – build more gas pipelines or find another way to get gas into New England.
We have energy efficiency programs to reduce the heating load, but we also have people converting from heating oil to gas for heating fuel, so we aren’t likely to reduce gas used for heating by very much.
Gas and solar are the cheapest options for generating electricity now, so nobody wants to build anything else, particularly if it is only going to be used at night for a few weeks every winter. Peaker plants are expensive, and they are even more expensive when they are only used for seasonal demand. There’s pretty much no way that anyone is going to build a new coal plant in New England. That leaves wind, diesel, energy storage, and importing power from other regions. The opposition to wind is very strong, which makes it hard to actually build much wind power. Energy storage is still too expensive to be economical. Diesel is dirty and expensive. Importing power requires building new high energy transmission lines, which seems to be unpopular with the state government.
The expanded gas pipeline is probably the cheapest option for expanding winter power production. There are a lot of people who are opposed to it, for good reason. It is an expensive project that will take several years to build and will then increase our fossil fuel dependence and our sensitivity to the price of natural gas.
All of the options for replacing the power output of this power plant are expensive and increase our GHG emissions. Based on how strong the political support for the gas pipeline is in the statehouse already, I think that closing this nuclear power plant virtually guarantees that it will happen. We don’t have many other viable options.
there was a clean energy source that peaks on winter nights …
You write that
The data do not bear this out. Head on over to the ISO-NE Energy, Load, and Demand Reports page and scroll down to “ISO NE Seasonal Peaks since 1980.”
ANNUAL NEW ENGLAND PEAK DATA
year mon date day peak(MW) hour-end
2005 JUL 27 Wed 26885 15
2006 AUG 2 Wed 28130 15
2007 AUG 3 Fri 26145 15
2008 JUN 10 Tue 26111 17
2009 AUG 18 Tue 25100 15
2010 JUL 6 Tue 27102 15
2011 JUL 22 Fri 27707 15
2012 JUL 17 Tue 25880 17
2013 JUL 19 Fri 27379 17
2014 JUL 2 Wed 24443 15
Sure enough, the peak comes on a summer weekday, hour ending 3pm, sometimes 5pm. Not winter, not nighttime.
Again, not in New England. We’ve got some PV, to be sure, on the order of 1,000 MW. Look at peak again — 27,000 MW. And, that’s at 3pm or 5pm, when solar PV isn’t producing at 100 percent. Solar helps, but we don’t have nearly enough PV in New England (yet!) to have the impacts that you’re suggesting.
No, that isn’t the problem, not exactly. The problem was that the gas electric generators weren’t reserving the gas. They were promising ISO-NE they’d deliver electricity to the grid, and not meeting their obligation. To resolve this, the ISO changed the compensation rules so that if you promise and don’t deliver, you get penalized. Know what the gas-fired generators did? They filled up their oil tanks for backup. Two solutions not in your list, but they solved the problem. They didn’t need more gas, and they didn’t need to build more plants. They needed to utilize their fuel switching by ensuring sufficient fuel on site. Securing additional wintertime LNG deliveries will also help to alleviate the strain. Other things that will help: efficiency on the electricity side (you just mention the heat side), fixing the gas leaks throughout the system so less is wasted, building additional gas or electric storage within New England.
Not even close. Market rule alterations, EE, PV, fuel switching, LNG tankers, gas storage, and demand response are all likely to be less expensive. However the issue is also one of scale. Can these suite of options be scaled up by enough quickly enough to sufficiently reduce the risk or the cost associated with a prolonged cold snap? That’s not a blog answer. That’s a $200,000+ study.
The converse may also be true: bringing on more gas pipeline into New England will suppress wholesale market prices, which will put the final nail in Pilgrim’s coffin.
P.S. Lots of things in your post are correct… I’m only highlighting where I think you’re mistaken.
We were at 3 MW of solar statewide in 2008 and are at 949 MW now. Multiplying it another 4 or 5 times isn’t about feasibility, it’s about the political will.
And then there’s offshore wind. The areas off MA already designated by the federal government are enough to provide 8 MW – several Pilgrims worth of power. Again, it’s not can we, it’s will we.
(correcting tgm’s typo)
There’s no question in my mind that, in the short run, it means higher emissions. However, to the extent that Pilgrim dropping out results in higher energy and capacity prices, it will draw in new resources.
I’ll just make a few discombobulated observations.
1) The precipitating event seems to be the prospect that Entergy might (horrors!) have to bear the expense of safety improvements ordered by the NRC in 1992. Given that, operating the plant for another 4 years does not seem like such a hot idea—unless the company makes the safety improvements first.
Instead this is a concession to enable continued operation beyond safety requirements. The profit margin should not be the unsafety margin.
2) Entergy skated by, by running Pilgrim on the cheap. it must not be allowed to decommission Pilgrim the same way. The state should order it to fund fully the decommissioning account and to dry cask all of the fuel. No walking away with the job half done.
3) To add financial incentives against shoddy work, Entergy should be perpetually liable for damages from defects in the decommissioning of the plant and the storage of the waste. (At least, to the extent that capitalism permits such a thing.)
4) We are increasingly seeing local organizations such as Downwinders and the Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance play critical roles in fighting for the best possible cleanup result. That part is just beginning at Pilgrim.
The spent rod pool will be perpetual until Yucca Mountain is opened.
How dare he suggest transitioning to wind the way he helped kill Cape Wind?
But who needs it anyway? The Cape is doing fine. With hi leadership:
We had a 49% electric rate increase already. We have a 5 year moratorium on new or expanded natural gas hookups. The geniuses in Boston are pressing PART so they can close down Seamass waste-to-energy in Rochester.
Supporting Wind Power is part of the platform of the Democratic Party, and it is entirely possible for someone to “Evolve” on a position when it becomes central to the people to whom he is supposed to represent. Without the ability for politicians to evolve, where would we be, with no states west of the Appalachian mountains, no amendments to the constitution beyond the first 10.
And what does “hi leadership” mean?