The Bow coal plant, a.k.a. Merrimack Station, the last operating coal plant in New Hampshire, has won another reprieve. We have agreed to pay the owners $189 million over five years to keep the “Peaker Plant” operating so it can send power into the grid when there is a surge in electrical demand. Note that the $189,000,000 doesn’t buy us any electricity – that’s extra – and costs far more than electricity generated normally. What we do get, in addition to keeping the plant running, is higher electrical costs, lots and lots of pollution –724,000 tons of CO2 in 2018 – plus heated water dumped into the Merrimack.
Supporters like Gov. Chris Sununu might claim that eliminating the plant could cause us to freeze in the dark – as actually happened recently in Texas, where the cost of electricity from gas plants surged from $3 per watt to $999 per watt. (The actual cause was the refusal to use antifreeze in the gas plants and wind turbines.)
But there are real alternatives. In Australia, Tesla installed a 100 MW, 129 MWh battery at a cost of $90 million. That unit stores unused electricity made at normal prices, and sends it into the grid when needed – just like the Bow plant, but without heating the river, without dumping pollution into the air, and without jacking up the cost of electricity. Since electricity from the battery doesn’t raise prices, the utilities save money. Big money. Australia saved $40 million the first year the battery was operating, and $116 million the following year, or 175% of the original battery cost. In other words, over the first two years, the savings, less the cost of the battery, was nearly equal to what we spent over two years to run our coal plant. And they still have the battery, and we just have more pollution.
BOB IRVING
Salisbury