Richard Martin reports that environmental groups won a major victory in California in late June when the group proposing a 600-megawatt natural-gas-fired power plant near Avenal said it would abandon the project. Slated to cost nearly $2 billion, the Avenal plant was the subject of a dozen years of controversy and legal wrangling, and last year a federal appeals court vacated environmental approvals for the project.
For the Sierra Club and other groups attempting to block all new fossil-fuel plants in the United States, the decision to abandon Avenal came as a signal - the tactics that have worked against the coal industry, which has not won approval for a new plant in more than a year, can now be applied successfully to the expanding natural-gas industry.
But such victories are not the rule. About 275 miles south of Avenal down Interstate 5, in Carlsbad, an equally ambitious natural-gas plant won approval from the state Public Utilities Commission in May. The Carlsbad Energy Center, a 500-megawatt, five-unit plant, is designed to replace generation capacity lost with the closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in 2013 and the impending retirement of the Encina Generating Station, also in Carlsbad.
In many cases, such plants are cheaper to build, and more economical over the long term, than competing forms of power generation. According to the Energy Information Administration, the cost of energy over their lifetime is $75.20 per megawatt-hour for conventional natural-gas plants that will come online in 2020. For conventional coal plants it is $95.10, and for solar it is $125.30. Only onshore wind, at $73.60, is less costly than natural gas.
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