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HUNTINGTON -- West Virginia lawmakers were briefed Tuesday on a report detailing concerns with the retirement of coal-fired plants central in the debate on whether to save the Pleasants Power plant.
Asim Haque, the vice president for State Policy and Member Services at PJM, briefed members of the Joint Standing Committee on Energy and Manufacturing on a Feb. 24 report released by PJM, titled "Energy Transition in PJM: Resource Retirements, Replacements and Risks." Interim meetings were held at Marshall University at Huntington.
"Today, we have enough resources...we have enough watts and enough central reliability services for the grid to be completely reliable," Haque said. "Demand is going up. We're losing a lot of supply. Are we going to get an injection of supply so that supply and demand meet? That is something that...we are keeping a very close eye on, but that's our mid-term concern."
According to the report, coal-fired power plants are retiring at a rapid rate while the growth rate for electricity demand is expected to increase. While new sources of electricity -- such as natural gas plants, wind, and solar farms -- are coming online, they are not coming online quick enough to replace the power being lost as coal-fired plants retire.
"PJM's interconnection queue is composed primarily of intermittent and limited-duration resources," the February PJM report states. "Given the operating characteristics of these resources, we need multiple megawatts of these resources to replace 1 (megawatt) of thermal generation."
According to the PJM analysis, more than 40 gigawatts of existing electric generation are at risk of retirement by 2030 due to power plant deactivations, announced retirements, and potential retirements of plants based on policy and economic considerations, representing more than 21% of PJM's current installed capacity.
Of those 40 gigawatts of retirements, 60% would come from the closure of coal-fired power plants, 30% from natural gas-fired plants, and 10% from other sources.
"The projections in this study indicate that the current pace of new entry would be insufficient to keep up with expected retirements and demand growth by 2030," according to the report. "The completion rate (from queue to steel in the ground) would have to increase significantly to maintain required reserve margins."
"It's not a today issue, but we need to be thoughtful about it," Haque said. "We have a very diverse fuel supply of thermal generators with a combination of coal, gas and (nuclear). We are going to need some combination of those in the future...as renewables continue to find their way on to the system, we're going to have to have enough, and enough in the right places on the grid, of these thermal generators in order to continue to preserve reliability in the long run until a replacement technology is deployable at scale."