Ben Bradford was looking for a new angle when he wandered into Long Beach’s $800 million replacement gas plant. “You’re building another fossil fuel plant! How can this be consistent with our climate change goals?” he asked. “It’s actually part of the puzzle,” overseeing manager Stephen O’Kane explained to the Market Place reporter. You could be looking at the last gas bridge in this golden state.
The Part in the Puzzle This Last Gas Bridge May Play
Natural gas arrived in abundance with fracking and has helped California improve its green energy profile. However, renewables are not ready to take over, especially when it comes to grid battery storage.
The old Long Beach gas plant had become inefficient, especially as it had to run all the time. It was hardly the peaking solution California needed. That was because it took several hours to run up or close down. This may well be the last gas bridge California will ever build, the overseeing manager told reporter Ben Bradford. This one can turn on and off in minutes.
However, We Need to Manage the Length of the Bridge
Natural Gas has largely ceded the price-benefit to batteries since the latter cost started falling sharply. “Renewables and batteries are about to do to gas what gas has done to coal in this country, meaning making it uneconomic.” So says Mark Dyson at clean energy think tank Rocky Mountain Institute.
In order to stave off “the most catastrophic effects of climate change” scientists believe we will have to shut the last gas bridge down by 2050. Gas stations have a typical design life of forty years so we need to be careful not to overplay that hand. “I do find it really scary,” Annada Levin of Natural Resources Defense Council told the reporter. “Utilities tend to try to run these plants as long as they can.
“They want to make sure they get their money back.” We’ll settle for saving the climate.
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Preview Image: A Bridge Should Be the Right Length
