By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent
What Happened:Our friends at the Environmental Defense Fund penned a fascinating blog post on the future of energy production in the Northeast, with particular focus on:
- whether the lack of natural gas pipelines in the area will harm fuel stability in the region, and
- outlines the challenges for regulators in the region as they look to keep their energy supplies stable.
SolarWakeup’s View: The central question facing the Northeast, at least according to N. Jonathan Peress of the Environmental Defense Fund is how the Northeast will continue to keep its fuel supplies secure if it uses natural gas as its transition energy from fossil fuels to renewables.
Peress does an admirable job of laying out some of the myths surrounding the building of natural gas pipelines in the Northeast and then goes on to explain how these challenges might be overcome with the right regulatory framework.
Here’s the thing, though: As recent examples in Arizona and California indicate, renewables may have already lapped natural gas as a transition energy. Let’s review:
In California, the Public Utilities Commission has become far more unwilling to allow its utilities to build or fix natural gas plants and is insisting far more often that they produce grid support through the use of solar + storage instead. And in Arizona, the Corporation Commission (its public utilities commission – if I were king for a day, I would insist these bodies be called by a consistent name) told Arizona Public Service (the state’s largest utility) to throttle back its plans to build 5.3 GW of natural gas plants in its latest integrated resource plan and instead resubmit it with more renewables (read: solar) in it.
Energy storage is the key. As the technology gets better and the prices come down, the need for a transition energy like natural gas becomes increasingly less important. So while N. Jonathan Peress’ analysis may well be spot on, it may also become increasingly irrelevant as renewables + storage become more prevalent in the generation mix.
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