Electric Utility Resource Planning

Appendix G: Mini-Lesson #5— How Can a Resource Option That Produces Emissions Lower a Utility’s Total System Emissions? (“The Taxi Cab Example”)

In Chapter 7, as part of our non-economic analyses of our hypothetical utility system, we evaluated each of the five resource plans in terms of projected system air emissions. The result was that a resource plan (Supply Only Plan 1 (CC)) that added a new generating unit resulted in the lowest projected system emissions for SO₂ and NO_X. Furthermore, the new generating unit that would be added, a 500 MW CC unit, was the largest generating unit that was evaluated and this unit was projected to operate on our utility system 80% of the hours in the year.

The result of that evaluation may have been surprising, ...