I hope so. I am watching Exelon’s efforts with the Matagorda County effort. You’re looking at a 48% increase in electricity demand in Texas by 2030, and since there’s going to be an 8-10 year lead time in bringing on any kind of significant new baseload capacity, the time is now to move ahead with these things.
“I am watching Exelon’s efforts with the Matagorda County effort. “
As a central Texas resident and Excelon shareholder, I am watching with interest as well.
I hope their plant goes well.
Now should be a good time to get a nuclear engineering degree and/or get in the nuke construction business again. There should be quite a bit of build out in the next 20 years, should all these plans come to fruition.
See:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/7/1/55720/19863
The difficulties with the coal proposals and the remaining demand for increased baseload capacity provided a window for NRG Energy, the largest shareholder (44%) of the South Texas Project Nuclear Operating Company (STPNOC) to propose expanding the 2 existing units at STP to 4. TXU similarly proposed expanding the two units at Comanche Peak (Dallas region) to four; these plans remain active after TXU scrapped most coal designs. Two additional plants on greenfield sites are also proposed; one by an Amarillo group, the other by Exelon corp. to be situated on the Gulf Coast somewhere near the STP site. In total, these represent somewhere in the neighborhood of 8000 MW capacity on top of ~4500 MW existing nuclear capacity. For scale, Texas capacity was approx. 63,000 MW in Summer 2006. If 8000 MW of nuclear displaced an equal amount of coal or natural gas and overall consumption remained the same, it would still only bring Texas to the national average for nuclear power usage (~20%). However — it would go a very long way towards decreasing out CO2 emissions, and integrate well with expansion of wind power.”
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