Power costs cloud outlook for coal plant
It’s nothing unusual for environmentalists to square off against a new power plant project.
But the environmentalists and the project’s developers are veering off the traditional tracks over the proposed $400 million advanced coal power plant in Jamestown.
Usually, it’s the developers who complain that new environmental technology will be too costly. In Jamestown, it’s the environmentalists who argue that the plant’s electricity will be way too expensive.
Typically, it’s the environmentalists pushing for extras to reduce harmful emissions and cut down on pollution. This time, it’s the developers touting the plant’s added environmental features to ease global warming by capturing its harmful carbon dioxide emissions and storing the gas more than a mile underground.
“We view the Jamestown plant as a completely unnecessary plant disguised as a carbon capture experiment,” says local environmentalist Walter Simpson, a spokesman for Clean Energy for Jamestown, a consortium of more than a dozen environmental groups opposed to the project.
Even if the developers succeed in winning the substantial federal funding they’re seeking, the environmentalists estimate that the electricity generated by the power plant will cost 15 cents to 20 cents per kilowatt, or roughly five or six times more than the average mid-June wholesale power prices in Western New York.
Adding and supplying power for the still-developing technology to capture the carbon dioxide emissions and store them safely—and permanently—underground could add at least another nickel to the costs, pushing it to the 20 cent to 25 cent range, Simpson says. The Jamestown municipal utility’s customers now pay about 6 cents per kilowatt.
The environmentalists say there are far cheaper alternatives. Simply buying the power the Jamestown Board of Public Utilities needs to replace the output of its aging conventional coal plant would be far cheaper than building the proposed advanced coal facility, says Ronald Melquist, a former BPU worker who is a leader of the opposition efforts.
“If you don’t need it, don’t spend it,” he says.
Putting up a handful of wind turbines could generate the power the utility needs for far less, and with even less pollution. A biomass plant or stepped-up conservation efforts also could do the trick for a fraction of the coal plant’s cost, Simpson says.
The project’s supporters, however, say the proposed 50-megawatt plant can make economic sense, although they won’t discuss their estimates of how much its power might cost because so much hinges on whether it gets sufficient federal funding. About half of the plant’s power output would be used to operate the sequestration process.
“It’s a difficult thing to pin down, but it doesn’t mean we’re recklessly pursuing a project that doesn’t make sense,” says David Leathers, the Jamestown utility board’s general manager. “If the cost of electricity is expensive, then the project is not going to go forward.”
Leathers hopes the federal funding will bridge any cost gaps. If it does, the plant could put Western New York on the map as a showcase for a new, less polluting coal technology that could capture up to 95 percent of its carbon dioxide emissions. It also could turn the region into a center for advanced coal research in conjunction with the University at Buffalo.
“We want to be innovative. We want to be a leader,” Leathers says.
But, like NRG Energy’s aborted $2.3 billion advanced coal project at the Huntley Station in the Town of Tonawanda, which failed last year because its power would cost too much, the Jamestown plant faces similar questions over its economics.
“I don’t want to pay to be the showplace to the world,” Melquist says. “It will come out of my pocket.”
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