> If you build a bunch of $2B shiny new gas facilities, as we are doing today, utilities will want to run them for decades.
Utilities will want to run anything for decades, but gas plants are crazy cheap. A $2B natural gas power plant is inconceivable. A 500MW plant costs more like $500M (probably less), but AFAIU they're typically built smaller. And construction is very fast, on the order of 1-2 years. We've been building many, relatively small plants, which means phasing them out can likewise be done incrementally.
All of which means that even if we need to ditch natural gas, it won't be that painful, ignoring the comparative costs of natural gas itself.
Given the nature of many utility executives of expecting static costs of renewables from old estimates (a problem that also plagued the EIA and IEA), couples with regulations on what sort of profits utilities are allowed to collect, I expect that we will invest in far more natural gas than is economically rational.
And that's excluding the economic externalities of carbon emission; if we properly priced things we'd probably only build natural gas in some very extreme cases, and we'd be retiring far more natural gas.
It's frustrating to have such fast technology change, but have it go unacknowledged by key decision makers and decision influencers in both industry and government.
I'm not disputing that there'll be pain, or that we shouldn't be building them so quickly. I'm disputing how much pain and structural lock-in there'd be.
The article says that "planned investment in new gas power plants and pipelines totals over $100 billion", but that "by 2035, over 90 percent of proposed combined-cycle gas plants, if built, would be uneconomic to run compared to the cost of building a new clean energy portfolio."
Considering how quickly plants can built and how clean they are, at least in the sense of environmental regulations requiring long lead times (and therefore sunk costs) in preparing sites, if the predictions are true then energy executives should be able to pivot rather quickly. Most of the risk in a roadmap for building a bunch of gas plants isn't in being locked into building the gas plant, it's in the opportunity cost of not preparing for whatever the alternative will be. So long as wind and PV have similar initial costs, then pivoting should be easy. "Planning" to build $100 billion in gas plants is alot different than planning to build $100 billion in nuclear or hydro.
FWIW, I'm not disagreeing that maybe we should be incentivizing renewables more, but I can't get too worked up about it, either. The factors that make natural gas easy to switch to also make it easy to walk away from, particularly if you're walking away from planned construction.
Utilities will want to run anything for decades, but gas plants are crazy cheap. A $2B natural gas power plant is inconceivable. A 500MW plant costs more like $500M (probably less), but AFAIU they're typically built smaller. And construction is very fast, on the order of 1-2 years. We've been building many, relatively small plants, which means phasing them out can likewise be done incrementally.
All of which means that even if we need to ditch natural gas, it won't be that painful, ignoring the comparative costs of natural gas itself.
Sources: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.p..., https://www.eia.gov/electricity/generatorcosts/, via https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=487&t=3