Exelon considering new power plant for region

Peco's parent, Exelon Corp., said today that it hoped to build a new power plant in the Philadelphia area to serve more than half a million households.

Exelon said its 600-megawatt plant, to be completed no sooner than 2012, would cost about $700 million. It will burn natural gas.

The development came just two days after Exelon had announced a new solar-energy plant for Philadelphia - to power a far more modest 200 households. The two plans highlight what remains a huge gap in the cost of fossil-fuel facilities vs. alternatives.

A photovoltaic solar plant that could generate the same amount of power as a gas-fired plant would be about eight times more expensive to build, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

Other energy sources that do not emit greenhouse gases also are capital-hungry, according to the EIA. Nuclear and geothermal plants would be about three times more expensive than the natural-gas plant, and wind power twice as expensive.

Once the plant is online in 2012, according to EIA data, only certain coal plants would cost less to run. A nuclear plant would be cheaper still, but could not be brought online before 2016.

The company said it was considering several sites for the $700 million plant. Each of the locations is owned by Exelon and is or was at one time the site of a fossil-fuel power plant, according to Exelon spokesman Tim Brown. There are 15 such sites, all in Southeastern Pennsylvania.

The biggest of them are:

Cromby Generating Station, a natural gas or oil-fired plant in Phoenixville, Montgomery County.

Eddystone Generating Station in Eddystone, Delaware County, which is fueled by natural gas, oil and coal.

Schuylkill Generating Station in Philadelphia, which is fired by fuel oil and activated only during peak-demand periods, usually in the summer.

Exelon's announcement said the company expected to narrow the list of sites over the next six months.

Brown said that, compared with earlier generations of gas-fired power plants, the new plant would use less fuel to generate the same amount of power and thus release a smaller volume of greenhouse gases. He also said the addition of the plant to the electric grid would reduce the use of older fossil-fuel plants.

Exelon has established a corporatewide goal of reducing, displacing or offsetting all of its carbon emissions by 2020.

While natural gas is regarded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as the cleanest-burning of the fossil fuels, such as oil and coal, it cannot match the cleanliness of most of the new alternative-energy sources. Solar, wind, geothermal and other more exotic power sources have virtually no emissions, though various experts debate their broader environmental impacts.

But the cost of building alternative- and renewable-energy plants remains much higher than for the carbon-emitting fossil-fuel plants.

According to the EIA, the cost in 2006 - the latest year for which data are available - to build a gas-fired power plant such as the one Exelon plans was lower than almost any other power-plant technology on a per-kilowatt basis.