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Vermont Closing Its Nuclear Plant Means More Natural Gas for New England

Proximity to the Marcellus shale makes natural gas all too appetizing.
The Vermont Yankee plant, via the NRC

When Entergy Corp. announced that it was closing the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, it became the fifth nuclear power plant to be marked for decommission in the last 12 months. Since demands for electricity show no signs of dropping, it’s fair to ask where the next gigawatts will be coming from.

If California is still a trend-setter—or if energy growth just continues as it has for the last decade in the region—it looks like New England is headed for more natural gas.

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The decision to close Vermont Yankee was based on the high cost of maintaining the plant safely and reliably as well as the low price of natural gas thanks to the fracking boom, according to a press release from Entergy. It would now appear that fracking-depressed energy prices leading to nuclear shutdowns is becoming a bit of a trend.

To prepare for the closing of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which supplied enough energy for 1.4 million homes in Southern California, the Golden State has been building gas-fired plants. Chris Clarke at KCET reported that “a 500-megawatt plant in City of Industry, 560 megawatts in El Segundo, 200 megawatts in Anaheim, and the mammoth (and controversial) 850-megawatt Sentinel plant in Desert Hot Springs" just came online or are about to.

"SoCal is awash in excess natural gas-fired power plant capacity," Bill Powers, a San Diego-based engineer and electrical utilities analyst, told Clarke. "That's due to a decade-long building boom that is still underway. The permanent shutdown of San Onofre will not necessitate any new construction of gas-fired plants or long-distance transmission lines.”

Despite the push for more capacity, power prices increased in Southern California by 59 percent during the first half of 2013. The Energy Information Administration blamed the hike in part on San Onofre’s closure and part on a rise in the cost of natural gas.

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Regardless, California energy companies are working to expand natural gas capacity. According to a story in UT San Diego, the utility company San Diego Gas & Electric is delaying the retirement of the Cabrillo II natural gas power plant until 2015, and will apply later this year to charge consumers in order to upgrade natural gas pipelines.

To ride the wave of cheap natural gas, New England may have to build some pipelines too. An op-ed in Sea Coast Online by Marc Brown, executive director of the New England Ratepayers Association, pointed out that New England’s reliance on natural gas has risen by 30 percent in the past decade, but restrictive pipelines have allowed electricity prices spiked both last winter and during this summer’s heat wave.

Brown also pointed to the Northern Pass Project as a way to bring relief to the New England grid. The Northern Pass Project is a proposal to run 180 miles of new power lines carrying 1,200 megawatts of hydropower from Canada through northern New Hampshire. The project is controversial, however, because it involves routing power lines through New Hampshire’s forests and putting up huge towers on private property.

As the debate over how much of those power lines can and will be buried—and where—continues, New England has cast its lot with natural gas, which generated more than half of its electricity in 2012.

If the dream of swapping nuclear power for renewable power seems lost, take heart that there are green shoots in Vermont, nicknamed the Green Mountain State. The Burlington Free Press reports that “in 2014, 35 percent of Green Mountain Power’s electricity will come from Hydro Quebec, and 26 percent from renewables.”

But the closing of Vermont Yankee is now a debate about how to make sure the state doesn't get stuck with an expensive decomissioning bill, and a quiet strengthening of America's reliance on fracking, and the low-priced natural gas it brings.