Dominion Energy South Carolina now says it may retire coal-fired power generation by 2030, a significant reversal of plans released by the utility last year.
Dominion’s new 15-year plan said that closing two coal plants and converting a third to natural gas is the best option for several measures. Natural gas would mainly replace coal generation.
The dealership took over SC Electric & Gas in 2019 and serves customers in Charleston, Columbia, Aiken, Orangeburg and Beaufort. His initial proposal could have kept at least one coal oven in operation until 2071. That plan was rejected in December by the SC Public Service Commission.
At a previous hearing, the commissioners questioned whether Dominion was following its parent company’s goals of bringing carbon emissions to zero. Now, the dealership’s preferred route would be to close the coal-fired Williams Station on Goose Creek by 2028, close Wateree Station on Eastover in the same year and convert the Cope Station to gas only until 2030.
“The closure of these plants will be of great benefit to the health of families and children who have been forced to live, work and play in the shade of coal burning plants that pollute the air and the rivers where they sail and fish,” said Will Harlan , from the Sierra Club Beyond Coal campaign.
Sierra Club is one of several groups that criticized Dominion’s original plan before the PSC.
The concessionaire would make a difference mainly with more plants burning natural gas, which Harlan called “myopia”. Dominion would also add some solar generation and batteries to store energy.
“As we transition to a cleaner energy future for South Carolina, we remain committed to low-cost, low-emission natural gas generation as an integral part of a sustainable and diverse fuel mix that is critical to serve our customers and communities with safe, affordable and reliable power, “said Paul Fischer, a spokesman for Dominion.
Natural gas releases about half of the carbon dioxide from coal when burned for electricity, according to the United States Energy Information Administration, and does not include any other pollution that comes with coal, such as mercury contamination.
But the biggest component of natural gas is methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent in warming the Earth than carbon dioxide, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Methane leaks during gas extraction or transport can make the final carbon footprint of the fuel more significant.
Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Gudrun Thompson said the revised plan is a big improvement, but reliance on gas makes the scenario more “mixed”. She said this could become less economically viable if stricter rules to combat climate change come into play at the federal level.
Dominion was forced to redo its proposal at the end of last year, after the concessionaire’s regulating PSC said some of the basic assumptions of the job were wrong. The commission was given much more power to review the dealerships’ plans in a 2019 state law. Dominion was the first utility company to present a plan after this change.
“This is a radical change from a few years ago, when stakeholders like us were commenting and basically nothing would happen,” said Thompson, who is representing the Coastal Conservation League and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy in the process.
Dominion’s updated plan still looked at his old favorite path, which would have kept coal online for longer. But, using different basic assumptions, including the possibility for the government to start taxing carbon emissions, the general math has changed.
The company still plans to study in more detail how it will retire its coal units, said Fischer.
Andrew Brown contributed to this report. Talk to Chloe Johnson at 843-735-9985. Follow her on Twitter @_ChloeAJ.