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Strategies & Market Trends : Bob Brinker: Market Savant & Radio Host -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MrGreenJeans who wrote (11492)	1/6/2001 9:38:13 PM
From: Chuck Schmeling	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42834

<<The major problem here is that there is a need for more generation but no one wants generation or new plants built in their backyard. For the record I don't want a plant by my house either.>> Just some random thoughts...I agree with your statement. It is one of the major problems facing many areas of the country. We need the power, but can't get it built. Opposition to power plants and transmission lines grew up in the 70's and 80's. In the 90's utilities were looking ahead to the coming "deregulation" and were not making the investments in generation and transmission that they may not be able to pay for. The 90's were also a period of economic expansion and energy demand. Generation reserves were used up for base load. Now we are caught short. Privately owned merchant plants are being used to try to make up the shortfall, but they are not without problems. Most, if not all generation being built today is fired with Natural Gas. Does anyone know of a Coal fired generation plant being built today? Remember the "Gas Bubble we had in the early 90's? We had more gas reserves and transportation capacity than there were markets for the stuff, and Gas was cheap. It was also clean, so it was more acceptable to environmentalists. Now that more Gas fired plants are being built, the Gas Bubble is going away, and the market price for gas is going up. Way up. Couple the higher fuel prices with high demand for electricity, and what does that do to rates? Some food for thought... one 90 MW Gas Turbine generator uses approximately as much gas in an hour as 15,000 homes. A merchant plant is being built in our area that, when complete, will burn as much gas in one hour as 75,000 homes. There are two more plants proposed for 2003 and 2004 that will burn the same amount. That's a lot of gas folks! Now we start looking at Gas exploration and production capacity, and Gas Transmission capacity to see what it will take to get enough Gas to run these things.