Booming power demand is slowing climate progress for US utilities. Sierra Club analysis finds that U.S. utilities are planning a huge expansion of fossil gas-plants — a shift that’s incompatible with climate goals. For the fourth year in a row, the Sierra Club reports that most of the largest U.S. utilities are well off track to meet the Biden administration’s goal of cutting electricity-sector emissions by 80 percent by 2030 from a 2005 baseline. That’s a key milestone for meeting U.S. Paris Agreement commitments and limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And according to the environmental group’s latest “Dirty Truth” report, released Wednesday, many major utilities are not only off track to reach climate goals but are in a worse position than they were last year. This backslide is largely due to the abrupt surge in U.S. electricity demand. In the past year or so, many utilities have dramatically increased their power demand forecasts as new data centers, factories, and electric vehicles look to plug into the grid. Many of these utilities — though not all — have asked state regulators for permission to build new gas plants and keep coal plants open longer to serve these rising loads.
Canary Media 9th Oct 2024
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/fossil-fuels/booming-power-demand-is-undermining-us-utility-climate-progress
US – HALEU
Six companies have been awarded contracts worth a minimum of USD2 million each to provide deconversion services, a critical part of the supply chain for high-assay low-enriched uranium.
World Nuclear News 9th Oct 2024
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/us-doe-awards-contracts-to-spur-haleu-supply-chain
Three Mile Island
A fast-track PJM interconnection review could speed Three Mile Island restart: Constellation CFO. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, D, urged the PJM Interconnection on Friday to adopt expedited interconnection studies for shovel-ready projects. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is urging the PJM Interconnection to quickly develop a fast-track process to review interconnection requests for shovel-ready generation such as Constellation Energy’s 835-MW unit 1 at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant — dubbed the Crane Clean Energy Center. “Given the lengthy review process for new projects, it is imperative that shovel-ready resources like the Crane Clean Energy Center be allowed to come online as quickly as possible rather than waiting in the [interconnection] queue as if they were an entirely new development,” Shapiro, a Democrat, said in a letter to PJM on Friday. Earlier that day, Constellation said it has a 20-year deal to sell all the energy, capacity and clean energy attributes from the nuclear unit near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Microsoft for the tech company’s data centers across PJM’s Mid-Atlantic and Midwest footprint. Constellation aims to restart the unit in 2028. It shuttered the unit in 2019 because it wasn’t economically viable. Morgan Stanley analysts estimate Constellation will sell power to Microsoft for $98/MWh compared to market power prices of around $50/MWh. Constellation also expects the unit’s output will receive a roughly $30/MWh clean energy tax credit. (NB The clean energy transition is rapidly underway in PJM, the largest electric grid operator in the United States. This regional transmission organization (RTO) that coordinates the wholesale electricity system in the Mid-Atlantic region has an unprecedented 258 GW of projects waiting in its interconnection queue to be studied and connected to the grid. That’s 1.4 times the amount of currently installed capacity in PJM, and 98 percent of these projects (by nameplate capacity) are carbon-free resources. https://rmi.org/ongoing-struggle-to-join-pjms-grid/ )
Utility Dive 23rd Sept 2024
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/fast-track-pjm-interconnection-review-three-mile-island-constellation-microsoft-ppa/727736/
