Thursday, December 6, 2012

Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis Releases New Report on Projected Fuel Mix for Electric Generation

 

By Alan Rukin

The Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis (“JISEA”) recently issued a report projecting an increase in the use of natural gas as a fuel for electric generation across five different scenarios. JISAE is a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the University of Colorado-Boulder, the Colorado School of Mines, the Colorado State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University.

In most of the studied scenarios, the report projects that the use of natural gas as a generation fuel will increase between 50% and 100% by 2030 and between 100% and 200% by 2050 when compared to 2010 levels. In the baseline scenario, the report projects that, by 2050, natural gas could represent between 28% to 38% of the nation’s generation as compared to 2010, where natural gas represented about 20%. Across all but one of the studied scenarios, the report projects that the electric industry will continue and expand its dependence on natural gas as a fuel source. The report also notes that coal’s share as a generation fuel has declined from 48% to 36% of total generation between 2008 and August 2012 based on information the Energy Information Administration collected.

This August, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission held a series of regional technical conferences on efforts to increase coordination between the electric and natural gas industries. This November, FERC scheduled additional technical conferences to expand on those it held in August.    Previous posts by the Energy Law Times concerning electric-gas coordination issues can be found by clicking here and here. 

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