Southern Indiana Utility company - Vectren - announced plan to go from 78% to 12% coal powered

[Finishline42]

Last edited Tue Jun 16, 2020, 01:41 PM - Edit history (1)

By mid-decade.

The electric utility serving southern Indiana's coal country yesterday announced a plan to transition swiftly from coal to renewable energy as part of a strategy it said would save consumers more than $300 million and slash carbon emissions.

The plan, announced by Vectren Corp., would reduce the utility's reliance on coal from 78% this year to just 12% by middecade.

Vectren, a unit of Houston-based CenterPoint Energy Inc., is the second Indiana utility to announce a massive shift away from coal in the past two years and comes in spite of intense lobbying by Indiana's coal industry to slow the retirement of aging plants.

In late 2018, Northern Indiana Public Service Co. announced a plan to shut its coal fleet within a decade — most of it by 2023 — and replace much of the capacity with renewables.

Vectren's announcement is similar. Under a "preferred portfolio" that's the core of a 20-year integrated resource plan (IRP), the utility would shutter most of its coal-fired generation by 2023 and add more than 1,000 megawatts of wind energy and solar, some of which would be paired with battery storage.

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The plan does call for adding 460 MW of combustion gas turbines in 2024 and continuing to operate the 270-MW Culley 3 coal unit.

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063396059

[keithbvadu2]

1. Don't forget the coal jobs that Trump is going to bring back... Soon?

[Finishline42]

2. Nobody is surprised that the Indiana House and Senate passed a bill to support coal

Indiana’s coal bill is heading to the governor’s desk as legislation that would extend the life of the state’s coal-fired power plants for a year — following a seesaw battle between lawmakers over its major tenets.

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House Bill 1414 squeaked out of the House early last month with provisions that would make it harder for utilities to shutter coal-fired plants and created an incentive for utilities to buy more coal.

The Senate made changes that watered down the House bill: It moved the bill's expiration up by four months, and took out the need of the state's utility regulatory commission to analyze and issue a report on a utilities plan to retire a coal plant. But those changes were rejected by the House, sending the bill to conference committee.

Rep. Ed Soliday, the bill's author, returned the bill's end date to May 1, 2021, and reinserted the role of the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to analyze and issue conclusions on proposed power plant retirements, a requirement that some critics said would only slow down the process.

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"The Senate took quite a bit out of the bill," said Soliday, R-Valparaiso, during the vote of the conference committee report on the House bill.

The conference committee did keep provisions to support coal industry workers and left out ones that would let a utility double its coal reserves.

Gotta love this part...

Soliday emphasized during his opening comments that "right now, no one is affected" and "nobody gets hurt" because there are no current plans by utilities to close a plant before the May 2021 deadline.

That said, Rep. Matt Pierce, D-Bloomington, asked why Indiana even needs the bill.

"I’m always amused when we have debate on bills and say the bills affect no one, but it's essential we pass it," said Pierce, the ranking minority member on Soliday's House Utilities, Energy and Teleconference Committee. "If the bill does nothing, then we don't need it."

He said there are many safeguards in place when deciding to retire a power plant. Pierce also expressed concerns about the signal this send about Indiana of not embracing the future.

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/environment/2020/03/10/indianas-coal-bill-reverts-house-version-its-way-become-law/5013142002/