New England energy conglomerate Northeast Utilities on Tuesday unveiled its plans for a $3 billion expansion of the natural gas transmission system, believing it will relieve bottlenecks on the system causing electric and heating price spikes.
NU, which is dually headquartered in Hartford and Boston, will partner with Houston-based Spectra Energy Corp. to expand two of the pipelines bringing natural gas into New England. The project, called Access Northeast, can be completed in phases to meet demand, but it has an anticipated in-service date of November 2018, as long as it is approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
The expanded capacity of roughly 1 billion cubic feet of gas will help meet the growing demand for natural gas in power plants and home heating systems. The increased domestic mining of natural gas has made it significantly cheaper than most other fossil fuels – notably oil – causing the rise of New England natural gas power plants, which now produce roughly half the electricity in the region, and expansions of natural gas home heating systems, including a $7 billion project in Connecticut.
Even though natural gas is cheap, the limited pipeline capacity makes it difficult to get the fuel to New England. Last winter, cold weather and pipeline constraints caused several natural gas power plants to shut down for lack of fuel, forcing the regional grid to rely on less efficient, more expensive plants. The average wholesale power prices in January, February, and March were the highest on record.
The NU-Spectra project will expand the Algonquin and Maritime pipeline systems. Spectra already has smaller expansions called the Algonquin Incremental Market and Atlantic Bridge scheduled to go into service by 2017, and the new NU project will complement those while adding significantly more capacity onto the system.
Because it is using existing infrastructure, the NU project won’t need more rights-of-way, according to the NU announcement. Those pipelines already attach to 60 percent of the region’s natural gas power plants, and the expansion will give local natural gas utilities more access to the transmission pipeline. NU is the parent company of natural gas utilities Yankee Gas of Berlin and NStar Gas of Boston.
Tuesday’s announcement comes after the collapse of the coalition of New England governors trying to get more natural gas and electric transmission infrastructure in the region. That coalition, called the New England States Committee on Electricity, was announced with much fanfare in 2013 but puts its plans on hold in August because – among other things – not all the governors were convinced of the need for more natural gas transmission pipelines.
