News
LCG, October 20, 2025--Holtec International announced today that the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant site in Michigan has received new nuclear fuel – 68 assemblies in total – that achieves a major milestone on the path to restarting the plant. The 800-MW facility was shutdown and decommissioned in 2022 due primarily for economic reasons; however, Holtec is progressing towards restarting the original unit by the end of this year, pending all necessary federal regulatory reviews and approvals. Achieving a successful restart of a shutdown nuclear unit will be a historic first for the nuclear industry.
Read more
|
LCG, October 14, 2025--Calpine Corporation today announced the close of a Texas Energy Fund (TxEF) loan agreement to support development of the Pin Oak Creek project, a 460-MW, natural gas-fired peaking facility adjacent to Calpine's Freestone Energy Center, a gas-fired combined-cycle facility located on approximately 506 acres near Fairfield, Texas.
Read more
|
|
|
Industry News
Exorbitant Natural Gas Prices Keep New Plants Off Line
LCG, April 8, 2003Recent unusually high natural gas prices are keeping newly built power plants from starting up.Plant owners and operators say that they cannot profitably operate plants in current economic conditions and may have to wait until the summer, when demand increases.Current gas prices are roughly $5 per million Btu, and over this past winter prices reached record levels.Most new plants built over the last few years have been natural gas-fired, a popular choice because of efficiency, local production of fuel, and cleaner emissions. Several natural gas-fired plants are also currently under construction, and roughly 300,000 MW of natural gas-fired capacity has been projected to come on line between 1998 and 2007. Deregulation efforts in many states encouraged the new construction, and many companies assumed that natural gas prices would remain stable when they initially planned the plants' construction.According to some in industry, the cost of operating a plant is currently higher than simply buying power.While many new plants are gas-fired, gas and oil plants comprise only a fifth of U.S. capacity. Coal and nuclear plants still dominate, generating some 70 percent of total capacity. Hydroelectric, wind, solar, biomass and others make up just 10 percent.Companies like Williams Cos. and PPL Corp. have either kept new plants off line or even requested to take plants off line. Other companies have delayed or halted construction of new plants in order to wait for better market conditions.Some U.S. companies are looking into liquified natural gas, an investment previously thought by some to be unnecessarily costly.
|
|
|
UPLAN-NPM
The Locational Marginal Price Model (LMP) Network Power Model
|
|
UPLAN-ACE
Day Ahead and Real Time Market Simulation
|
|
UPLAN-G
The Gas Procurement and Competitive Analysis System
|
|
PLATO
Database of Plants, Loads, Assets, Transmission...
|
|
|
|