EDF and CURE ask regulators to test gas plant forecasts

Will Scott of the Environmental Defense Fund and Hudson Kingston of CURE want state regulators to test proposed gas plants against the data-center forecasts behind them, in an Oct. 30 Utility Dive op-ed.

If the data-center projections behind a project fall short, they write, ratepayers carry 30 years of payments on plants that are increasingly expensive to build and slow to develop. Scott directs Environmental Defense Fund policy in North Carolina; Kingston is legal director at CURE, a rural environmental and energy democracy nonprofit in Minnesota. Once regulators approve a project, the authors note, a utility can recover its cost through customer rates before it is built or in use, and profit depends on the assets built rather than the energy sold.

For allocators underwriting regulated gas, the op-ed puts prudency review and the cost-recovery schedule at the center of the return on assets valued for approved cost recovery. A commission that shortens the recovery runway, or disallows costs tied to load that did not arrive, would change that return.

The authors concede that anticipating demand is not inherently a problem, and say clean generation for heating, cooling and EV charging would lower prices and improve reliability. They cite a recent study finding batteries cheaper than gas peaker plants globally. Their objection is to spending on fossil infrastructure justified by uncertain projections at a time when, they write, rising bills are making regulators more skeptical of proposals that bind ratepayers for decades.