Dive Brief:
- As part of a settlement with the Sierra Club, Mississippi Power will make a good-faith effort to actively pursue a 100 megawatt power purchase agreement of 10 years or more for wind or solar and contribute $15 million to Gulf Coast Foundation energy efficiency programs.
- Mississippi Power also committed to convert 775 megawatts of its 1,052 megawatt coal-burning Watson Plant’s capacity and about 200 megawatts of the 500 megawatt Greene County plant to natural gas-burning technology, the first by April 2015 and the second by April 2016, and to either retire the almost 120 megawatt out-of-date gas-burning Sweatt Plant, repower it with newer gas-burning technology, or convert it to a non-fossil fuel by the end of 2018.
- Sierra Club will in return drop its challenges to Mississippi Power’s 582 megawatt Kemper County Energy Center integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) project and accept the addition of scrubbers at the 1,580 megawatt coal-burning Daniel Plant, of which the Southern Company subsidiary owns half.
Dive Insight:
Sierra Club accepted the settlement, according to the Mississippi chapter’s director, because the Kemper plant’s cost, originally bid at $2.4 billion, is now at $5.6 billion and increasing, a price that makes IGCC coal technology non-competitive and promises the end of it as a viable investment.
As part of the settlement, Mississippi Power can seek cost recovery for the renewables PPA.
Mississippi Power also agreed not to prevent the expansion of solar in Mississippi by challenging any effort to bring net energy metering to the state.
