Why Are Utilities Switching From Coal To Natural Gas-Fired Generation?

Idaho Power has made a shift in its strategy to meet future electrical energy needs in southern Idaho and eastern Oregon.

The company now will de-emphasize plans to build a large scale coal-fired base-load generating resource and focus on development of a combined-cycle natural gas facility to be built somewhere in Idaho by 2012.

Combined-cycle combustion turbine technology uses a natural gas-fired turbine to turn one generator and then use the excess heat from that process to produce steam that powers a second turbine and generator. Together the proposed plant’s two generators would produce approximately 270 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough energy to power nearly 180,000 homes.

At the same time Idaho Power will continue to explore ways to utilize the West’s abundant supplies of coal in an environmentally responsible manner, although the company believes those development opportunities lie somewhere in the future. This will be after new technologies have been developed to capture and sequester carbon dioxide.  

For today, natural gas-fired generation is perhaps the only viable option available to bring a base-load generating resource on-line in time meet our customers’ growing needs.

New generating resources will mostly include renewable resources such as wind or geothermal. But for reliability reasons, those resources will have to be paired with existing and new traditional forms of energy such as natural gas and hydroelectric generation. These resources can be brought on-line quickly to respond to customer demand.