Shift from coal to gas for electric generation is well under way, says Siemens president

The market for new natural-gas electric generating stations is going strong because coal is on its way out, says the president of one engineering firm. This week Siemens Power Generation Group announced that it "has won contracts to supply five new high-efficiency gas plants to Progress Energy at two sites in North Carolina that have old coal-fired generators," Matthew W. Wald of The New York Times reports on the paper's Green blog. "It is also replacing old gas-fired plants in Florida." The six Progress plants are among the 11 coal-fired plants the company owns that do not have scrubbers. Progress says it will eventually close all 11.

"I think they came to the conclusion with all the uncertainty, and the likelihood that the rules for pollutants like mercury, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides will be further tightened, it’s not worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the back end," of an old power plant, Siemens President Randy Zwirn told Wald. "Per kilowatt-hour generated, the new gas-fired generators will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 60 percent and nitrogen oxides by 95 percent from levels produced by their coal-fired predecessors" Wald writes. "Nearly 100 percent of sulfur dioxides will be eliminated, and all of the mercury."

Siemens is supplying equipment for some of the few coal plants under construction around the country, but Zwirn said, "I don’t know of any negotiations we have currently going on for new coal plants." Siemens says it's building natural-gas facilities in areas not expected to need more power generation until 2018 or 2020, which suggests they will be used to replace some existing generation. "Load growth is currently not the driver for new capacity additions," Zwirn told Wald. "I think we’re beginning to experience the beginning of a fleet restructuring here in the U.S. that’s driven by regulation." (Read more)