Solar advocates in Michigan have joined the fight against new fossil fuel infrastructure, with a regulatory filing last week opposing a new 1,100-megawatt natural gas plant in St. Clair County.
The combined-cycle gas plant, proposed by utility DTE Energy, would go into service in 2023. “It would replace generation from retiring coal plants—but solar groups say it’s not clean enough,” Greentech Media reports.
- The climate news you need. Subscribe now to our engaging new weekly digest.
- You’ll receive exclusive, never-before-seen-content, distilled and delivered to your inbox every weekend.
- The Weekender: Succinct, solutions-focused, and designed with the discerning reader in mind.
The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) says DTE constructed its project plan using “outdated price forecasts for renewables, and chose the least efficient system design for solar energy, producing less favourable modeling of a clean energy portfolio,” Greentech notes. “On the other hand, it argues, the utility underrepresented the risks associated with the US$1-billion gas plant. Vote Solar claims renewable energy alternatives could save DTE customers $339 million to $1.2 billion.”
In written testimony, SEIA Director of Rate Design Kevin Lucas added that DTE “erroneously assumes that a resource must be dispatchable to be reliable.” That notion ” results in the unjustified discounting of a portfolio of distributed assets comprised of solar, wind, energy efficiency, and demand response as ‘unreliable’ and unable to meet DTE’s resource adequacy needs.”
By contrast, Greentech’s Julian Spector backgrounds some of this month’s developments in U.S. utility pricing and regulation, including the “fabulous” bids of 2.1 to 3.6¢/kWh that Xcel Energy received for new wind+storage and solar+storage supplies in Colorado. Elsewhere, the California Public Utilities Commission required PG&E, the state’s largest utility, to procure storage and other distributed energy resources to ensure grid reliability.
In Michigan, “DTE must prove that the gas plant is the ‘most reasonable and prudent’ means of meeting the identified capacity need, which is to replace 1,822 megawatts of coal generation slated for retirement between 2020 and 2030,” Spector notes. “Regulators wanted to see alternatives to the proposed plan, but the utility doesn’t appear to have considered such portfolios. Instead, it offered a perfunctory comparison between its gas plant and a ‘no-build’ scenario, where it does nothing and buys energy and capacity from the markets when it encounters shortfalls. DTE ruled that option out as infeasible.”
But somewhat contrary to the regulator’s instruction, “they didn’t actually seek bids for something other than a gas plant,” said Vote Solar’s Becky Stanfield. “To me, that’s the most telling sign.”
