I was just looking at that. The utility industry went on a buying spree when they added natural gas fired capacity starting in the early nineties due to a need for more reserve capacity. Enron was rumored to have contracted for 200 units from GE before they went bankrupt.
From the graphs it looks like even though the utilities increased their generation capacity to a current 30% from natural gas today, they’ve taken advantage of using the plants as on demand sources.
Thanks for pointing out my error! What happens when the utilities replace the coal fired base load power plants with natural gas to maintain capacity in the face of EPA mandated coal plant shutdowns?
In the past coal was still there to allow the natural gas fired units to be used on a discretionary basis/only as needed.
IOW are the utilities moving to a point where they will be forced to rely more heavily on natural gas? The question then is what will happen to pricing?
There was a much older price spike (late 70s?) when the oil price controls ended and the oil embargo time. What was essentially a subsidy towards oil fired electrical generation went away and there was a big push to move more to natural gas.
But that price spike was a better sign of why government interference, either for or against any select energy source, is always a bad idea.
This also provides some info of older data:
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/showtext.cfm?t=ptb0802a