Natural Gas-Fired Powerplants to Lead U.S. Power Generating Additions: March 2018 - February 2019
Wind-Turbines and Solar-PV will dominate Western U.S. new power sources
The U.S. Energy Administration's list of scheduled additions to the power generation fleet through February 2019 indicate that wind-turbines and solar-PV will comprise the majority in the West and Texas. Utilities in the Eastern U.S. will add several natural gas-fired powerplants, and smaller windpower and solar-PV sites. The EIA map below shows locations. Circle symbols are color-coded by generator type, and circle sizes are proportional to power output capacity.
U.S electric powerplant retirements planned for the same 12-month period will include coal combustion units, gas-fired turbines, and one nuclear station.
EIA's 2018 U.S new power generator survey monthly results, below, indicates natural gas-fired powerplants contributing the largest amount new of electrical generating capacity this year. Natural gas new gigaWatts are brown in each monthly bar. One gigaWatt equals 1,000 megaWatts or 1,000,000 kiloWatts. One Watt is the electrical unit for power measured instantaneously.
U.S. renewable-source power generating capacity additions exceeded non-renewable powerplants in five of the past nine years. Renewable power is expected to comprise 36%, or about 11 gigaWatts, of the total new 2018 generating capacity, according to the EIA chart below.
EIA's April 2018 Electricity Monthly Update chart of existing U.S. power generation fleet energy production, below, compares February 2018 (most recent month available) to February 2017.
The Central region ranked second in U.S. renewable-source monthly power production for February of both years.
One teraWatthour equals 1,000,000,000 kiloWatthours (kWhrs), the electrical-energy unit for metering residential and commercial electric service power consumption. If each Western region electric power user's kWhr meter measured an average of 1,000 kWhr in February 2018, the total month Western power production of about 55 teraWatthours shown on the chart would have supplied 55 million metered residential, commercial and industrial electric services.
Some industrial electric power consumers require many thousands to a few million kWhrs per month, while some homes and business need only a few hundred kWhrs monthly.