Coal news and updates

Florida utility Tampa Electric Co. has announced it will retire three coal units and double its solar output within two years. That’s good news, but in an interview published last week, its CEO doesn’t mention the fact that the vast majority of its power comes from natural gas or whether it plans to transition away from the methane-producing fossil fuel.

 

Tampa Electric has supplied electricity to the Tampa Bay area since 1899. Its electrical system currently features 655 megawatts (MW) of solar, enough to power 100,000 homes. The utility wants to add an additional 600 MW of solar in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

 

So its new total of 1,255 MW of solar would be enough to power 200,000 homes by 2023. Tampa Electric serves 800,000 customers in west central Florida.

 

Tampa Electric’s new-ish president and CEO, Archie Collins, who joined the utility in February, told the Tampa Bay Times in a story published on August 5:

 

We currently have on our system 655 megawatts’ worth of renewable energy, of solar. That’s enough solar power to power 100,000 homes, just to ballpark it, and it represents between 6 and 7% of our total energy sales.

 

So we will be at 14% by the end of 2023, and we are committed to even more beyond that.

 

He doesn’t comment on what “beyond that” means in the interview.

 

(And the math above doesn’t add up for me. If Tampa Electric has 800,000 customers, how is solar only going to provide 7% of total energy sales if 1,255 MW can power 200,000 homes? Am I missing something? Feel free to comment below.)

 

As for rooftop solar, as of September 2020, only 0.7% of Tampa Electric’s customers had it.

 

The utility also says it will upgrade its infrastructure and retire three out of four coal-burning generating units at the Big Bend coal plant in Tampa. Unit 1 will be converted to use natural gas combined-cycle technology by 2023.

 

 

Source : https://electrek.co/