Recently, Tennessee residents and national environmentalists temporarily won a fight against the installation of a 32-mile methane gas pipeline to TVA’s Cumberland City electrical generation plant northwest of Nashville. Permitting of this project was blocked because of concerns about the damage that construction explosives would do to local waterways. The environmental cost of this damage would also be disproportionately borne by a number of poor or minority communities along the pipeline’s path.
A longer-term concern about converting this plant from coal to gas is the dangerous effects of leaked emissions on climate change. This fossil gas, that has long been branded as “natural gas”, is often promoted as a cleaner alternative to coal because it does indeed burn cleaner. The primary component of this fossil fuel, however, is methane, which is 80 times more powerful at heating the planet 20 years after its release than carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The leaking of methane is a serious issue.
TVA is making an all-out effort to ramp up the number of these polluting gas-fired plants in its portfolio, having proposed the construction of nine plants since 2020 alone (making for a total of 17 sites in Tennessee, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Alabama.) The company is not convinced that solar, hydro, and wind installations are powerful and reliable enough to meet the increased demand for power in the TVA region.
According to TVA, methane gas plants are the perfect alternative for replacing coal plants. All of TVA’s marketing for new gas plant construction cheerfully promotes how much less carbon would be released into the atmosphere by switching from coal to gas. At the same time, the TVA board seems to conveniently ignore the science about the hazards of methane.
Methane is released into the atmosphere from leaks and routine venting during the production, processing and transportation of fracked fossil gas. A good share of methane leakage also happens unexpectedly; it’s difficult to ensure a gas well won’t experience leaks. Abandoned wells degrade more rapidly over time than those that are regularly maintained, and there’s no way to ensure the companies that own gas wells will stay in business to care for them. It’s totally possible to build a tight gas generation system from the bottom up, as has been done in Europe, but it’s very hard to fix the leaky system already in place in the U.S.
Gas plants themselves have already been problematic. Equipment has failed in freezing temperatures. During Winter Storm Elliott in December, 2022, TVA could not operate 10 out of 17 of its gas plants. Cold temps have also affected production wells, gas transportation, fracking sites, and compressor stations. Even if TVA could make these plants more resilient to cold weather, it can’t fix the rest of the supply chain without a lot of industry buy-in.
TVA assures they plan to use proposed methane gas plants mostly as backup for solar, wind, and hydro generation and to supplement the grid in general during peak–use periods. But gas plants used this way are relatively inefficient, and assurances aside, current gas plants are being planned to run 80% of the time. New methane gas plant build-outs could lock TVA into fossil fuel-sourced energy for decades. Why overbuild a hazardous technology that we may not need long term?
Every time the EPA announces more stringent standards to lower emissions, utility companies make dire predictions about their inability to meet these standards. But history shows us that new regulations actually compel utilities to cut costs and spur the innovation needed for better technologies. In other words, the industry is remarkably good at seeing the handwriting on the wall and acting accordingly. Also, there are government incentives to offset implementation costs, and these technologies get cheaper over time.
It’s time for a national energy policy that recognizes the dangerous methane emissions from fracked methane gas power generation and advocates for truly clean alternatives.
Cynthia Holzapfel
Environmental journalist and activist, ThirdAct TN
https://doi.org/10.1002/ese3.1934
cleantechnica.com/2024/10/06/criticisms-of-lng-export-emissions-study-dont-withstand-scrutiny/
www.ceres.org/resources/reports/case-epas-strong-track-record-forecasts-technological-progress