For several grueling days starting on March 9, Sierra Club lawyers and Beyond Coal Campaign staff engaged in a three-day long hearing before the Alabama Public Service Commission in an attempt to block Alabama Power’s proposed addition of new electric generating capacity, including construction of a new gas-fired power plant at Plant Barry near Mobile.
If approved, the 726 MW new gas unit (known as “Barry 8”) would come online in November 2023, and is part of a capacity expansion plan that the company says is necessary to meet reliability needs during unusually cold winter months. In addition to the new gas construction at Barry, the company is also proposing to purchase two currently operating gas plants, build five solar facilities with battery storage, and create 200 MW of demand side management programs. The total cost for the acquisitions is not entirely clear, but will cost over a billion dollars in capital costs alone, meaning that fuel costs are not included in that total.
Although we support the five solar and storage acquisitions in the proposal, ultimately this proposed portfolio of new electric generation assets represents four times as much dirty energy as clean. This is consistent with some trends across the utility sector, in which fracking has driven down the price of gas, leading utilities to attempt to build more gas-fired power plants to replace the coal-fired units that are increasingly being retired. That said, this new gas plant would likely remain on the grid for 40 years, long after the rest of the world has moved on to greater reliance on renewables -- and it should also be noted that Alabama Power continues to burn coal at three power plants across the state.
As part of our objection to the fossil fuels portion of the proposal, Sierra Club presented two different sets of expert testimony during the hearing. We objected to Alabama Power’s asserted economics and their proposed 26% reserve margin, which is the amount of electricity that the company says that it needs to keep in "backup" in case of extreme weather or outages in existing capacity. Post-hearing briefs are due in mid-April and a ruling is expected sometime thereafter, pending potential delays associated with the coronavirus pandemic. For more on the hearing, see here and here.