Posted on 02/03/2016 5:02:37 AM PST by thackney
Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. (PSEG) is planning a $1.6 billion investment in new gas-fired projects in the coming years.
PSEG Power President and COO William Levis tells Reuters the company is taking advantage of the "low gas-price environment" by building combined-cycle plants in Maryland and New Jersey.
The company is also looking into building a new 500-MW gas-fired facility by summer 2019 at the site of its 383-MW coal plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut - the state's only coal facility - which PSEG has agreed to close in 2021.
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.
Maryland “Freak State” PING!
What does combined cycle mean?
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