El Paso Electric’s service territory includes parts of Texas and southern New Mexico [1]. The electric utility recently became coal-free and continues to increase its focus on cleaner energy resources in 2017 [2].
In a nutshell, King Coal was dethroned. El Paso Electric’s CEO, Mary Kipp, explained: “This decision was not only the best environmental decision for our community, but it was also beneficially financially for all our customers.” She added, “El Paso Electric has a firm commitment toward providing safe, reliable, and clean energy that it also cost-effective . . . [3]”
El Paso Electric is but one of many companies leading (or following) the trend away from fossil fuels (such as coal) towards renewable energy. It just makes economic sense. As Seb Henbest, lead author of New Energy Outlook 2017 at BNEF, said, “The greening of the world’s electricity system is unstoppable, thanks to rapidly falling costs for solar and wind power and a growing role for batteries, including those in electric vehicles, in balancing supply and demand.”
El Paso Electric is proud to abandon coal. Last summer the company touted the fact that it was “the only utility in Texas and New Mexico to generate electricity 100 percent coal-free.” By increasing its investment in utility-scale solar, El Paso Electric will stop pumping more than two billion pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, which they claim “is the equivalent to taking 190,000 cars off the road and planting 20 million trees.”
To ensure a steady supply of electricity, natural gas plants replace the drop off of power production of solar at night and wind at the start of the day. El Paso Electric now uses 88-megawatt combustion turbines, powered by natural gas. Their quick start capabilities allow the units “to go from off-line to full output in less than 10 minutes,” the company highlights, “thus increasing overall power grid stability, and working in concert with the Company’s renewable energy sources.” The peaking capability and technology of their four units, allows El Paso Electric to address “demand fluctuations in an efficient and cost-effective manner, especially in the summer.”
Such gas plants increasingly act as one of the flexible power-generation technologies needed to not only to meet peak demands but to also provide system stability in an age of rising renewable generation. Natural gas plants, however, are not viewed as a long-term replacement for “baseline” coal.
As I have mentioned in earlier posts and in my novel, Breach of Trust, the pressure to control fossil fuel-based production of electricity and oil supplies for the world’s transportation needs, leads a shadow government to invoke murder and mayhem on the world’s renewable energy researchers. However, in the real world, the retirement of coal plants is underway as evidenced in America with both El Paso Electric and DTE Energy, an electric energy producer operating in the Midwest, which have retired or have begun to retire, respectively, their coal-generating power plants.
[1] According to El Paso Electric, the company is a regional electric utility providing generation, transmission and distribution service to approximately 400,000 retail and wholesale customers over a 10,000-square-mile area of the Rio Grande valley in west Texas and southern New Mexico. El Paso Electric has a net dependable generating capability of 1,990 MW.
Such gas plants increasingly act as one of the flexible power-generation technologies needed to not only to meet peak demands but to also provide system stability in an age of rising renewable generation. Natural gas plants, however, are not viewed as a long-term replacement for “baseline” coal.
As I have mentioned in earlier posts and in my novel, Breach of Trust, the pressure to control fossil fuel-based production of electricity and oil supplies for the world’s transportation needs, leads a shadow government to invoke murder and mayhem on the world’s renewable energy researchers. However, in the real world, the retirement of coal plants is underway as evidenced in America with both El Paso Electric and DTE Energy, an electric energy producer operating in the Midwest, which have retired or have begun to retire, respectively, their coal-generating power plants.
[1] According to El Paso Electric, the company is a regional electric utility providing generation, transmission and distribution service to approximately 400,000 retail and wholesale customers over a 10,000-square-mile area of the Rio Grande valley in west Texas and southern New Mexico. El Paso Electric has a net dependable generating capability of 1,990 MW.
[2] As reported in Solar Industry magazine, El Paso Electric decided to end its 50-year contract with a coal power plant in Farmington Four Corners Generating Station, a New Mexico-based facility in which it held a seven percent ownership position; a stake it has since sold.
[3] El Paso Electric Ditches Coal, Embraces Solar, Solar Industry, September 2016, pp. 8–10.
[3] El Paso Electric Ditches Coal, Embraces Solar, Solar Industry, September 2016, pp. 8–10.