Renewables will lead the new electric generation parade this year, led by solar, according to the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration. According to EIA’s Feb. 6 “Today in Energy” report, “Developers plan to add 54.5 gigawatts (GW) of new utility-scale electric-generating capacity to the U.S. power grid in 2023, according to our Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory. More than half of this capacity will be solar power (54%), followed by battery storage (17%).”
Utility-scale solar has been on a roll, “rising rapidly since 2010,” according to EIA. But 2022 saw a bit of a utility solar slump, down 23% compared to 2021. What caused the slowdown? EIA blames “supply chain disruptions and other pandemic-related challenges. We expect that some of those delayed 2022 projects will begin operating in 2023, when developers plan to install 29.1 GW of solar power in the United States. If all of this capacity comes online as planned, 2023 will have the most new utility-scale solar capacity added in a single year, more than doubling the current record (13.4 GW in 2021).”
Solar in Texas (7.7 GW) and California (4.2 GW) will lead the solar portion of the 2023 parade, accounting for 41% of the planned yearly new solar capacity. [EIA is not able to make useful predictions of what will happen with non-utility solar, as there is no central mechanism to collect that data – Ed.)
Battery storage is right behind. Battery installations have “grown rapidly over the past couple of years” says EIA. “In 2023, U.S. battery capacity will likely more than double. Developers have reported plans to add 9.4 GW of battery storage to the existing 8.8 GW of battery storage capacity.” The storage market is keyed to developments in intermittent wind and solar, overcoming the problems of times when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. “In 2023,”says EIA, “we expect 71% of the new battery storage capacity will be in California and Texas, states with significant solar and wind capacity.”
The wind will blow, but installations slow, predicts EIA, at 6.0 GW of new capacity. “Annual U.S. wind capacity additions have begun to slow, following record additions of more than 14 GW in both 2020 and 2021. The only offshore wind capacity expected to come online this year is a 130.0 MW offshore windfarm in New York called South Fork Wind.”
Two new nukes will be born, in a market long forlorn, ending the generation parade. “Two new nuclear reactors at the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia are scheduled to come online in 2023, several years later than originally planned. The reactors, with a combined 2.2 GW of capacity, are the first new nuclear units built in the United States in more than 30 years.”
Marching in the other direction, according to EIA’s Feb. 7 daily report: coal and gas (which is bidirectional, both adding and subtracting capacity). Of 16.5 GW of planned 2023 retirements, coal accounts for 8.9 GW and gas for 6.2 GW.
EIA says, “Substantial U.S. coal-fired capacity has retired over the past decade, and a record 14.9 GW was retired in 2015. Annual coal retirements averaged 11.0 GW a year from 2015 to 2020, decreased to 5.6 GW in 2021, and then increased to 11.5 GW in 2022. This year, power plant owners and operators plan to retire 8.9 GW of coal-fired capacity. That’s 4.5% of total coal-fired capacity at the start of the year. Most coal plants, notes the statistical agency, “were built in the 1970s and 1980s. As these aging coal-fired power plants compete with a growing number of highly efficient, modern natural gas-fired power plants and low-cost renewables, such as wind and solar, more of these coal-fired power plants are being retired.”
As for gas, notes EIA, “1.3% of the operating natural gas fleet as of January” is headed toward the retirement home. “Most of the retiring natural gas capacity is made up of older steam and combustion turbine units, which produce electricity less efficiently than many of the newer combined-cycle natural gas units.”
–Kennedy Maize
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