Report promoting coal plant falls apart under analysis
Erin McKittrick of the Alaska Energy Blog convincingly dismantles the recent report by Frank Paskvan, who has a contract with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, that claims a new West Susitna coal-fired power plant is a surefire solution to many of our energy woes:
“These days in Alaska, it’s fashionable to claim any project you want to build will solve both the Cook Inlet Gas crisis and climate change. The West Susitna coal plant idea claims to do both, and would actually do neither,” she writes.
“Instead, it’s an extremely expensive power source that tries to justify itself by ignoring the costs of transmission and the West Susitna Access Road and comparing its cost to inaccurate and inflated prices for natural gas power. Also it fails to compare to cheaper renewable options, and uses overly optimistic assumptions for both coal plant costs and experimental carbon capture technology. Rosy presentations with bad math have led the Mat-Su borough assembly to pass a resolution stating ‘Coal-fired power generation with CCUS presents a compelling alternative to imported LNG by providing affordable, reliable, clean electricity to the Railbelt grid at substantially lower than current costs’ -- when nothing could be further from the truth.”
Paskvan’s report, as I wrote here last week, piled assumption on assumption to justify its conclusion. It deserved a rigorous and critical examination from the Institute of Northern Engineering before being published, but did not receive it.
The assumptions accepted in the report—from the price of coal and natural gas to the continuation of federal subsidies beyond their official expiration date—are all but untested.
UAF has contracted with International Reservoir Technologies in Colorado for various tasks, one of which is “a case study on a CCUS (carbon capture utilization storage) applicability for a potential new power plant in Alaska to meet growing demand and as an alternative to dwindling Cook Inlet region natural gas supply.”
Paskvan is not an employee of UAF, but an “affiliate professor” of the institute working under contract until the end of the year. He is associated with International Reservoir Technologies.
UAF is a subcontractor with the University of North Dakota on a federal energy research contract. Among other things, UAF is to supply reports on the business case for carbon capture and storage on the North Slope and a “roadmap for deploying” carbon capture and storage in Alaska on a commercial basis . Here is the latest version of that contract, for a total of $1.8 million.