Regional impacts of expanding gas-fired electric generation in the Northeast U.S. and Eastern Canada

For the purpose of this presentation, the author placed emphasis on the northeast United States, including New York, New England, plus Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces in Canada. The entire region comes under the Northeast Power Coordinating Committee (NPCC) of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC). The objective of this Council is to assist with the coordination of electric supply as well as transmission planning and reliability of the utilities. The annual ten year forecast of electric supply, demand and fuel sources produced by the NERC formed the basis for the data presented. The deregulation of the electricity market in a few jurisdictions in the region resulted in the break-up of several electric utilities into their core components: generation, distribution and transmission. The generation sector is where the fastest break-up activity is taking place and merchant energy companies are emerging. Each of these merchant energy companies is competing against the other to effect sales into the wholesale power market through the building of at risk generation plants. The deregulation process is subjected to different processes and time tables depending on each state or provincial regulations. The construction of new power plants in the region is being driven by the merchant energy companies. They are building low capital cost and highly efficient natural gas combined-cycle base load plants as well as lower cost and moderately efficient natural gas/oil-fired simple-cycle peaking plants. This activity is mainly restricted to the United States, since hydroelectric power, coal and nuclear power are the main presence in Canada. New England experiences summer peaks while Canada has winter peak electric demand. To optimize intra-regional peak generation capacity sharing, there is an opportunity for the electric industry to move gas by wire, and a number of projects are being developed. It is expected that pipeline expansion will be lower in Quebec and Ontario and result in more capacity expansions from the Maritimes combined with intra-regional expansion in the United states Northeast. figs