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Lower Colorado River Authority Begins Major Improvement Project at Dam

January 31, 2023

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 31, 2023

The Lower Colorado River Authority is beginning a $76 million, three-year project to remove and replace the 10 floodgates at Wirtz Dam in Texas to help ensure the dam continues to operate safely and reliably, LCRA said on Jan. 18.

The dam, which creates Lake LBJ, was completed in 1951. The dam has nine original floodgates and a 10th floodgate that was added when the original Thomas C. Ferguson Power Plant was constructed in 1974.

Each floodgate will be removed and replaced with a new custom-made floodgate that meets current engineering standards. The work will be conducted on one floodgate at a time to help ensure the dam remains operational and available to pass floodwaters downstream.

Work on each floodgate is expected to take about two months, with the entire project expected to be completed in 2025.

Since fiscal year 2010, LCRA has invested more than $134 million in capital projects at the dams along the Highland Lakes, Lake Bastrop and Lake Fayette, including on the dams themselves and related hydroelectric generation infrastructure. LCRA plans to invest more than $107 million in these types of projects over the next five years.

In addition to replacing the floodgates, LCRA will upgrade the machinery that lifts the floodgates, called hoists. Two hoists will be replaced and eight will be refurbished. LCRA also will replace the existing hoist bridge.

Construction crews preparing the laydown yard will be in the area beginning in late January. Heavy equipment is expected to begin arriving in mid-February. Installation of the first floodgate is planned to begin in April.

Read more about the project at www.lcra.org/wirtzdamproject.

Calif. Community Choice Aggregator MCE Looks to be First to Own Generation Resources

January 31, 2023

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 31, 2023

California community choice aggregator MCE is taking the first step toward pursuing full or partial ownership in turnkey clean energy projects and is using a request for information process to solicit these projects.

If any projects are selected through this process, MCE would become the first California community choice provider to have full or partial ownership in their power plants, it said on Jan. 25.

MCE is seeking projects that are:

All projects submitted for review must be fully operational or ready for construction and be submitted for consideration to MCE by March 3, 2023.

Proposals can be submitted on MCE’s website and must include all proposal components as outlined in the Request for Information.

Serving a 1,200-megawatt peak load, MCE provides electricity service and programs to more than 575,000 customer accounts and 1.5 million residents and businesses in 37 communities across four Bay Area counties: Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, and Solano.

The American Public Power Association has initiated a new category of membership for community choice aggregation programs.

Minnesota Green Hydrogen Facility Registers Certificates on Renewable Thermal Tracking Platform

January 26, 2023

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 26, 2023

CenterPoint Energy, Minnesota’s largest natural gas utility, has registered a green hydrogen facility on the M-RETS renewable thermal tracking system to track renewable thermal certificates.  

CenterPoint Energy’s facility, which began operations in 2022, is the first-ever green hydrogen facility to register with a tracking system in North America and the company is receiving the nation’s first RTCs issued for green hydrogen, M-RETS said.

In an interview with Public Power Current, Ben Gerber, President and CEO of M-RETS, noted that M-RETS is a renewable energy tracking system. Along with a tracking platform for renewable thermal certificates, M-RETS also offers a renewable energy certificate tracking platform.

RTCs are a tool that represents the environmental attributes associated with renewable natural gas and other renewable thermal commodities, including green hydrogen.

CenterPoint Energy plans to retire the RTCs generated from its green hydrogen facility on behalf of its customers.

CenterPoint Energy’s green hydrogen system in Minneapolis uses renewable electricity and purified water to produce 60 dekatherms of hydrogen within a 24-hour period. The green hydrogen is added to natural gas in a portion of the utility’s local distribution pipeline system, reducing the carbon impact of the gas when burned.

M-RETS said that it created its renewable thermal tracking system in 2020 “to increase transparency, spur market development for industries that cannot be electrified, and provide the value and liquidity necessary to support renewable thermal projects.”

“With new incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, green hydrogen-producing facilities will grow,” Gerber said in a news release related to the CenterPoint announcement. “This is an important step to establishing the market.”

When asked to elaborate on the new incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, Gerber told Public Power Current that the law includes a provision that provides up to a $3/kilogram incentive for producing clean hydrogen, which “really starts putting it into a cost-competitive territory for decarbonizing the gas system.” Specifically, the Inflation Reduction Act includes a clean hydrogen production tax credit of up to $3 per kilogram.

Additional information about M-RETS is available here.

Public Power and Green Hydrogen

A report available to members of the American Public Power Association offers details on where the emerging hydrogen market is in the U.S. and globally, what is driving the growing interest in hydrogen and what obstacles are preventing hydrogen technology from being able to scale-up. The report is available here.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission Issues Final Rule Certifying NuScale Power’s Small Modular Reactor

January 25, 2023

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 25, 2023

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently issued a final rule to certify NuScale Power’s small modular reactor.

The company’s power module becomes the first SMR design certified by the NRC and just the seventh reactor design cleared for use in the United States.

The rule, which was published in the Federal Register, takes effects February 21, 2023.

The published final rule making allows utilities to reference NuScale’s SMR design when applying for a combined license to build and operate a reactor.

NuScale’s power plant can house up to 12 factory-built power modules that are about a third of the size of a large-scale reactor. Each power module leverages natural processes, such as convection and gravity, to passively cool the reactor without additional water, power, or even operator action.

The NRC accepted NuScale’s SMR design certification application back in March 2018 and issued its final technical review in August 2020. The NRC voted to certify the design on July 29, 2022 — making it the first SMR approved by the NRC for use in the United States.

Among the public power entities that have been pursing SMRs is Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems. The UAMPS Carbon Free Power Project is a nuclear plant to be located at the Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls Idaho. It will comprise of up to six NuScale Power Modules.

TVA Enters Agreement With GE Hitachi Related To Potential Deployment Of Small Modular Reactor

Meanwhile, the Tennessee Valley Authority in 2022 entered a two-party agreement with GE Hitachi to support TVA’s planning and preliminary licensing for a potential deployment of a BWRX-300 small modular reactor at the Clinch River Nuclear site and provide additional information needed as TVA continues to analyze the viability of SMRs, subject to future TVA board approval.

This follows an April 2022 collaboration agreement with Ontario Power Generation to support the development of small modular reactors as an effective long-term source of 24/7 carbon-free energy in both Canada and the U.S.

Nebraska Public Power District Launches Siting Study for Small Modular Reactors

Nebraska Public Power District is beginning the process of studying sites that could have the potential to host advanced small modular nuclear reactors, it said on Jan. 13.

The first phase of the siting study involves doing a Nebraska-wide assessment to determine the 15 best locations for siting small modular reactors based on geographic data and preliminary licensing criteria. Some of the key criteria being considered will be access to water and transmission lines among many others. This phase is estimated to be completed in spring of 2023.

The second phase of the study will perform a more in-depth evaluation and will focus on reducing the number of sites from 15 to four. This effort includes detailed field environmental and constructability evaluations based on criteria used by the NRC when licensing nuclear plants. This phase of the study is estimated to take approximately a year to complete.

DOE Encourages Southeast Hydrogen Hub to Submit Full Application for Federal Funding

January 24, 2023

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 24, 2023

The Southeast Hydrogen Hub coalition, which includes the Tennessee Valley Authority, on Jan. 19, announced that it is among the limited number of organizations encouraged by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to submit a full application in response to the $8 billion in funding for regional clean hydrogen hubs under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The coalition, as well as Battelle, is working to organize the potential hub and secure funding. After submitting an initial concept paper in November, the coalition received the DOE notification of encouragement on December 27, 2022.

Of the 79 concept papers the DOE received, 33 were encouraged to advance to the application stage. Formal proposals are due to the DOE in April 2023, with decisions expected in the fall.

A hydrogen hub in the Southeastern U.S. is expected to bring robust economic development benefits and jobs to the region, TVA and other utility members of the coalition noted.

“Hydrogen is attractive as an energy resource because it has immediate potential to accelerate decarbonization in the Southeast and across all sectors of the U.S. economy – including transportation, which generates the largest share of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the country,” they said.

The coalition’s concept paper described how the Southeast Hydrogen Hub would build on existing infrastructure utilizing technologies to advance the production, storage, transport, and delivery of hydrogen to transition the energy economy toward a decarbonized future.

Other members of the coalition include investor-owned utilities Dominion Energy, Duke Energy, Louisville Gas, and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Company and Southern Company.

Lower Colorado River Authority to Build Peaker Plant in Texas

January 24, 2023

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 24, 2023

The Lower Colorado River Authority on Jan. 24 said that it will build a new peaker power plant in Central Texas to provide an additional 190 megawatts of dispatchable power to the Texas power grid.

The natural gas-fired plant is expected to be operational in 2025. A peaker plant is one that typically is used for brief periods during times when the demand for power approaches or surpasses the amount of power available, LCRA noted.

As dispatchable power, the plant will be available to grid operators to call upon when renewable and other thermal generation are not sufficient to meet the state’s demand for electricity. The new LCRA plant will be able to ramp up and shut down in minutes.

The new plant will include 10 high-efficiency Wärtsilä reciprocating engines. Each engine can provide about 19 megawatts of power.

The new plant will be LCRA’s second peaker plant. The first is a 184-megawatt natural gas-fired facility in Fayette County that was built in 2010.

LCRA praised the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature “in their efforts to increase the supply of electricity available to Texans and to promote the wholesale market signals necessary to make an investment like this possible.” Regulatory certainty is important for LCRA and others to commit to invest in new dispatchable power generation, it said.

CPS Energy Board of Trustees Approves Generation Planning Portfolio

January 24, 2023

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 24, 2023

The Board of Trustees for Texas public power utility CPS Energy on Jan. 23 voted to approve a generation planning portfolio that includes a blend of gas, solar, wind and energy storage.

The generation planning process considered replacing aging plants and the continued use of coal while meeting the city’s climate goals, maintaining reliability and remaining competitively priced.

The board’s decision followed input from the community and a Rate Advisory Committee. At the direction of the Board, the RAC spent the last year reviewing the utility’s current power generation resources and future options in meetings with San Antonio-based CPS Energy and consultants.

The RAC is made up of 21 members comprised of 11 appointees by the CPS Energy Board of Trustees, including Mayoral appointees and 10 City Council appointees. 

CPS Energy also held a series of community engagement efforts, among which included open houses, a virtual town hall and customer survey. 

Final survey results indicated the following customer consideration preferences:

Renewable Energy’s Share of Total Generation Will Continue to Grow, EIA Says

January 23, 2023

by Peter Maloney
APPA News
January 23, 2023

Generation from renewable energy resources will continue to outstrip generation from fossil fuel plants, according to the latest data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Increased power generation from new renewables capacity, mostly wind and solar power, will reduce generation from both coal-fired and natural gas-fired power plants in 2023 and 2024, the EIA forecast in its latest Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO).

With the new solar and wind projects slated to come online this year, renewable resources will account for 16 percent of total generation in 2023, up from 14 percent last year and 8 percent in 2018, EIA said.

Renewable resources, especially wind and solar power, have been growing rapidly in the United States. There were about 74 gigawatts (GW) of solar photovoltaic capacity at the end of 2022, which is about three times the capacity at the end of 2017, and U.S. wind power has grown by more than 60 percent since 2017 to about 143 GW, EIA said.

Based on planned additions reported to the EIA, solar capacity is expected to increase by 84 percent with the addition of another 63 GW by the end of 2024, aided by declining solar construction costs and tax credits. With the increase in capacity, the EIA expects solar power’s share of total generation will rise from 3 percent last year to 5 percent in 2023 and 6 percent in 2024.

The growth in wind power installations is slower this year than in recent years, at about 12 GW of new planned capacity over the next two years, EIA noted. Expectations of wind power’s share of total generation in 2023 remains similar to last year, averaging 11 percent for both years, with a 12 percent increase expected in 2024, EIA said.

Much of the growth in solar capacity is occurring in Texas and California, where natural gas has been the primary source of electricity, the EIA said. A growing share of generation from renewables, combined with the agency’s forecast of less overall electricity demand this year, will displace some natural gas generation, which will decline slightly, falling from 39 percent in 2022 to 38 percent this year and to 37 percent in 2024.

The EIA also forecasts a two percentage point decline in the share of generation from coal-fired plants, to 18 percent, this year, as lower natural gas costs make coal less competitive. The EIA expects coal generation to fall again in 2024 to 17 percent of total generation.

UAMPS Signs Updated Agreements for Small Modular Reactor Project

January 19, 2023

by Peter Maloney
APPA News
January 19, 2023

Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems recently signed an updated agreement that will help move its nuclear Carbon Free Power Project with NuScale Power forward.

Specifically, the project management committee for the Carbon Free Power Project reaffirmed its commitment to NuScale’s small modular reactor technology by approving a new budget and plan of finance agreement and an updated development cost reimbursement agreement.

The development cost reimbursement agreement establishes an updated target price of $89 per megawatt hour, which reflects the changing financial landscape for the development of energy projects nationwide, NuScale said.

The budget and plan of finance agreement provides UAMPS with an option to withdraw from the Carbon Free Power Project and be reimbursed for most out-of-pocket expenses if the per megawatt hour price of energy from the project exceeds a certain threshold.

The development cost reimbursement agreement was reached with the receipt and acceptance of the CFPP’s Class 3 project cost estimate, which refined the anticipated total cost of the project.

The Class 3 project cost estimate determined that the cost of the CFPP has been influenced by external factors such as inflationary pressures and increases in the price of steel, electrical equipment and other construction commodities not seen for more than 40 years.

As an example, NuScale said the producer price index for commodities such as carbon steel piping and fabricated steel plates have increased by more than 50 percent since 2020. These inflationary pressures are increasing the costs for all power generation and infrastructure projects, the company said.

NuScale and the CFPP have yet to execute the amendment to the development cost reimbursement agreement adopting the new price target.

The CFPP, sited near Idaho Falls, Idaho, at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, would be the first NuScale Power SMR plant to begin operation in the United States.

The plant would deploy six, 77-megawatt modules to generate 462 MW of carbon-free electricity. The CFPP remains on schedule and is a cost-competitive, carbon-free and dispatchable resource, NuScale said.

UAMPS is a joint action agency serving 49 members in seven Western states.

Reading, Mass., Utility Extends Hydro PPA With FirstLight Power

January 19, 2023

by Peter Maloney
APPA News
January 19, 2023

Reading Municipal Light Department has extended a power purchase agreement with FirstLight Power that will enable it to exceed Massachusetts’ noncarbon compliance requirements, which requires utilities in the state to obtain 50 percent of their power supply from noncarbon sources by 2030.

The agreement calls for RMLD to purchase all the hydroelectric power and renewable energy credits from FirstLight’s Falls Village Generating Station in Falls Village, Conn., which averages around 41,000 megawatt hours per year. Falls Village is a three-unit hydroelectric station on the Housatonic River that is qualified as a Class I renewable run-of-river energy facility. The new power purchase agreement will run from 2025 through 2040.

“This deal with FirstLight Power maintains our portfolio at approximately 25 percent hydroelectric power and reinforces RMLD’s prudent risk management practice of maintaining a balanced power supply portfolio across geography and generation type,” Gregory Phipps, RMLD’s general manager, said in a statement.

The agreement also positions the towns of Reading, North Reading, Wilmington, and Lynnfield as leaders in the state’s efforts to achieve decarbonization, RMLD said.

In November 2020, 21 public power utilities in New England signed agreements to purchase 200 million kilowatt-hours per year of hydroelectric power produced by FirstLight Power in Western Massachusetts in a deal structured and executed by Energy New England.

FirstLight has since extended individual agreements with several participating utilities, including an agreement signed in October with Energy New England that extended the power purchase agreements with 13 Massachusetts public power entities that have agreed to purchase over 110 gigawatt hours per year of hydroelectric power produced by two of FirstLight’s hydroelectric facilities in Connecticut.

Energy New England is a wholesale risk management and energy trading organization serving public power utilities in the northeast.

Reading Municipal Light Department serves over 70,000 residents in the towns of Reading, North Reading, Wilmington, and Lynnfield Center.