Another proposed natural gas power plant has been called off in Western Pennsylvania, this one after eight years of development, permitting and opposition.
Chicago-based Invenergy, which was developing the Allegheny Energy Center project in Elizabeth Township, surrendered its installation permit last week and withdrew its application to connect to the regional grid. Invenergy cited “current market conditions” in a one-sentence statement about its decision and declined to elaborate further.
But environmental groups that have fought the project from its zoning variance requests at the local level to its air permit applications with the Allegheny County Health Department celebrated their role in scuttling the plant, just as they did with the $1 billion proposed Renovo Energy Center in Clinton County that was canceled in April after eight years of permitting and development. The same groups, including PennFuture and the Clear Air Council, said strong community advocacy also ended the prospects of a natural gas plant that was proposed in Robinson Township. That initiative let its environmental permit expire in 2021 and never reapplied.
“Allegheny Energy Center’s demise marks the end of giant new fossil-fueled power plants in Pennsylvania,” said Joseph Minott, executive director and chief counsel for the Clean Air Council. “Instead of locking us into decades of fossil fuel use and fueling the climate crisis, Pennsylvania can invest in wind and solar, which are safer, cheaper, and guarantee our energy independence far into the future.”
Invenergy’s 639-megawatt power plant, if built, would have made enough electricity to power roughly half a million homes. It also would have been a significant emitter of nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, ammonia and air pollutants.
The project had been through several iterations since Invenergy first proposed it as a 550 megawatt gas plant in 2016 on the site of an industrial dump along the Youghiogheny River.
It was met with opposition from residents and environmental groups, who argued it would be a major source of pollution and a visual blight on the area. Invenergy moved the project to another area of Elizabeth Township to tackle some of these challenges. In 2021, environmental groups challenged the project’s air permit and the case had advanced to trial. Then, after some witnesses had already testified, Invenergy asked to pause the proceedings, according to the groups’ account on Monday.
Angela Kilbert, a senior attorney with PennFuture, declared Invenergy’s retreat a “victory for Allegheny County.”
“We will continue to fight to protect the health of our communities from the harmful air pollution impacts imposed by fossil fuel facilities like this one,” she said in a statement.
It’s not clear exactly what pushed Invenergy to abandon the effort now.
The development of the Marcellus and Utica shales in Appalachia shuffled the dynamics of the regional power grid, which is operated by PJM Interconnection and includes Pennsylvania and 12 other states. With a new source of cheap and plentiful fuel, developers proposed to build gas power plants to soak up the new supply. Many of them never materialized.
New natural gas power plant additions peaked in 2018, PJM wrote in a report in February that looked at the impact of the energy transition. More than 11 gigawatts of natural gas generation was added to the grid that year. That tapered to 8.1 gigawatts over the following four years.
New project proposals dropped.
“Over the last three years, only 4.1 gigawatts of new natural gas projects entered the queue, while 15.1 gigawatts of existing queue projects withdrew,” the report said.
In its energy transitions study, PJM assumed that only natural gas power plant projects that are already under construction will eventually make it onto the grid. Its current queue of projects looking to connect to the grid is overwhelmingly dominated by solar and battery storage in Pennsylvania.
“If significantly more natural gas capacity achieved commercial operation, it could help avoid reliability issues,” PJM said.
Grid reliability is an increasing concern for regulators and consumers, as more large, albeit dirtier, power plants retire with cleaner but more intermittent sources taking their place.
Natural gas is now the dominant fuel for power plants in the PJM grid, but its reliability has also been questioned in recent years after large portions of its supply chain, from frozen wells to malfunctioning equipment at gas power plants, brought PJM to the brink during a Christmas storm last year. Its lessons are still being learned.
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