PSEG to spend $1.6 billion to build gas-fired U.S. power plants
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-pseg-natgas-idUSKCN0V6302
While PSEG’s investments regularly include capital for upgrading and expanding existing units, the combined-cycle plants, planned in its 2015-2019 budgets, would be the first significant new generators built in a decade or so.
Combined-cycle facilities are the most efficient gas-fired power plants because they use both gas and steam turbines to get more electricity out of the same fuel than a simple-cycle plant. PSEG is building one in Maryland and another in New Jersey and hopes to build a third in Connecticut, Levis said.
“One of the biggest changes we have seen with the collapse in gas prices is that our combined-cycle plants have become one of the workhorses of our fleet,” Levis said, noting some of the combined-cycle units were running about 70 percent of the time up from just about 20 percent a decade ago.
excerpted...
GE’s plant in Schenectady which makes the generators for those units is working three shifts 24/7. I haven’t heard what the gas turbine plants somewhere in the Carolinas is working.
What does combined cycle mean?