By Christine Pendzich and Bob Muehlenkamp
Building a new gas plant in Maryland is a really bad idea. It’s bad for ratepayers, bad for the climate, and bad for public health.
Yet on February 3rd, Maryland’s top lawmakers stood before the public at a press conference in Annapolis and announced a controversial and risky plan to try to lower power bills and relieve grid congestion by…building…a…gas…plant!
So controversial is this idea that the legislators did all they could to avoid even saying the word “gas” throughout the 28-minute press conference. Yet legislative language released two days later by Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City) and House Speaker Adrienne Jones (D-Baltimore County) – the so-called “Next Generation Energy Act” — paves the way for a whopping three gigawatts of new gas combustion in the state. The bill fast tracks electricity-plant construction equal to all existing coal and oil plant capacity in the state today, capacity that is likely to be retired soon due to the failing economics of these dirty plants.
Top environmental groups in the state – including Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network – were quick to oppose any plan to replace those plants with new gas, saying cheaper, cleaner, and faster-build alternatives exist. And they are right.
Some good energy bills were also announced at the same February 3rd press conference. A bill to cut red tape in the deployment of solar power and batteries in the state is an excellent idea from Senator Brian Feldman (D-Mont) and Delegate CT Wilson (D-Charles). And a bill to improve energy planning in the state is badly needed from Senator Katie Hester (D-Howard) and Delegate Brian Crosby (D-Calvert).
But the Ferguson-Jones bill opening the door to a gas plant is the opposite of what Marylanders need right now. Let us count the ways.
Gas is BAD for ratepayers.
Think your power bill is too high now? Just wait till you start paying for a multi-billion-dollar gas plant or plants near Baltimore that are much more expensive than alternatives. That construction of up to 3,109 megawatts of power from gas – which the Ferguson-Jones bill invites — would likely cost close to $4 billion dollars. If every Marylander shared that cost equally, it would run a family of four about $2,580.
But President Ferguson has already hinted that the expense could be much higher. Surely knowing how controversial a new fossil fuel plant will be to voters when sea-level rise is already harming downtown Annapolis and extreme weather is disrupting cities and farms everywhere, he said the proposed plant could be “converted” to a carbon capture and storage facility “when that (technology) is available.“
Well that technology is available now for gas plants but no U.S. state has used it because it’s fantastically expensive – and will likely remain so. You have to capture the carbon dioxide after combustion, pressurize the CO2 into a pipeline, and finally inject it into a subterranean cavern guaranteed never to leak. That would add nearly $350 million per year to the gas plant operation, drenching ratepayers with even more costs.
And, by the way, the nearest possible place to plausibly inject compressed carbon is in far western Maryland – so a pipeline would need to be built out there.
Even without carbon capture, a prominent study commissioned by Google and conducted by the respected research firm Brattle shows building a gas plant today is significantly more expensive than deploying utility-scale batteries (as Texas and California have done to address electricity load growth and grid stability) or investing in energy efficiency and “smart grid” technology. Without a doubt, these alternatives could be deployed to solve Maryland’s in-state generation problem faster and at a lower cost. A bill this year from Delegate Lorig Charkoudian (D-Montgomery) – called the Abundant and Affordable Clean Energy Act (HB 398/SB 316)– would do just that.
Ferguson and Jones are suggesting the opposite, implying that gas is the best option. But no one – not the legislators, not the gas companies who stand to profit millions, no one – has presented to the public any independent data or modeling that shows gas beats out alternatives on cost. Where are the numbers? Are lawmakers going to vote without looking at any comparison or independent data? And how about the January announcement of new AI technology showing data centers may need only one-tenth of the energy surge that utilities point to as a big justification for more power plants? Will new gas plants in Maryland end up largely standing idle at a huge cost to ratepayers?
Gas is BAD for the climate.
Make no mistake, despite good strides on clean energy in the past, authorizing construction of a massive three gigawatt gas plant in the 2020s, in a world of rapid global warming, will be THE climate legacy of this General Assembly — forever. And if Governor Wes Moore signs it, despite his personal strong support for offshore wind and solar in the state, the gas plant will be an indelible stain on his record for future state and national voters to remember. The tragedy is that the General Assembly, which has done as much as any statehouse to pass climate bills like the Clean Energy Jobs Act and the Climate Solutions Now Act, has helped lower the cost of solar and efficiency and battery technology, making them CHEAPER alternatives to the gas plant they’re being asked to vote for now.
How, exactly, does a gas plant fit into the state’s statutory goal of being carbon neutral by 2045? It doesn’t. Unless, of course, it’s equipped with the carbon capture and storage technology which, again, is still largely untested and wildly expensive and thus makes the present clean-energy options even cheaper as alternatives.
And all talk of gas as “better” for the climate is largely untrue. Scores of studies have shown that when you combine the methane leakage from the drilling process – through violent fracking in neighboring states – then add leakage in pipelines on the way to the final combustion plant, the greenhouse gas “lifecycle” total is nearly as bad or worse than coal.
Gas is BAD for public health
Beyond injury to the climate, gas-burning power plants harm human health. They emit air pollutants like nitrogen oxides (NOx), which are linked to respiratory problems, asthma, heart disease, and can particularly affect vulnerable populations like children and the elderly living nearby, leading to increased rates of lung and heart issues due to exposure to poor air quality.
Using the former Biden Administration’s “social cost of carbon” calculation, a three-megawatt gas plant operating just 15-20 percent of the time as a so-called peaker plant (1500 hours per year), would add an additional $425 million dollars per year in social and environmental harm. Plus, fossil fuel plants are disproportionately located near communities of color, compounding issues of justice.
Time for real solutions, not gas
Fundamentally, the gas plant proposal is bad public policy. Maryland legislators are ignoring abundant information that shows that clean energy, battery storage and energy efficiency solutions are available, cost less and are healthier for consumers and ratepayers than fossil fuel options. The cleaner solutions do, though, take money away from entrenched, politically powerful interests – most notably utilities. If lawmakers are serious about lowering electricity bills and helping Maryland ratepayers, they would abandon talk of building a harmful multi-billion-dollar gas plant and instead pass the alternative bills noted above, especially the Abundant and Affordable Clean Energy Act. And reforming the boondoggle STRIDE Program, where Maryland gas companies saddle consumers with unnecessary underground pipe build outs, would save tens of billions of dollars for ratepayers.
The bottom line: Gas is bad for everyone. Pursuing clean-energy alternatives saves money, lives, and our environment. Lawmakers need to start paying attention to what’s good for their constituents. They should vote no on any new gas plant in Maryland.
(Christine Pendzich is a member of the Steering Committee of 350 Montgomery County and Bob Muehlenkamp is a volunteer with Third Act Maryland. Both groups are committed to fighting climate change with clean energy.)