Who's Tripping?
It requires a truly acrobatic stretch of the imagination to reach the same conclusions as Pennsylvania Commissioner John Hanger in his article, "Electric Reliability: How PJM Tripped on Gas-Fired Power Plants" (May l, 1995). The truth is that the natural gas system performed efficiently and reliably in January 1994, exactly as planned. The operators of the power plants in question purchased interruptible gas-transportation contracts to keep their fuel costs low. Such capacity is seldom available during extremely cold weather, which is why interruptible capacity costs less. Had the plant operators purchased firm-service contracts, the gas would have been there.
Despite its title, the article's statistics clearly demonstrate that the rolling brownouts were caused by the unavailability of coal-fired power plants:
s 40 percent of the PJM grid's coal capacity (em nearly 12,000 MW (em was unavailable at the time of the winter peak.
s Only 1,150 MW of interruptible, gas-only capacity was unavailable (em less than 10 percent of the unavailable coal capacity.
Instead of raising questions about the wintertime reliability of gas-fired electric generation, Commissioner Hanger has actually, provided evidence of the pitfalls of an overreliance on coal.
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Michael Baly III
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President & CEO
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American Gas Association