As Entergy Louisiana works to build a new power plant in Westlake, the Alliance for Affordable Energy tells The American Press it will closely follow the process to make sure southwest Louisiana residents do not bear the brunt of the plant’s operating costs if the plant is approved.
Entergy Louisiana applied to the Louisiana Public Service Commission on Nov. 2 for approval to construct the Lake Charles Power Station, a nearly 1,000-megawatt combined-cycle gas turbine facility.
In its application, Entergy says its need for significant amounts of long-term capacity will continue to increase over the next decade because of load growth and unit deactivations.
Entergy also says it “needs base load and core load-following resources to satisfy a projected energy deficiency, without which resources customers will be exposed to market energy prices without the benefit of offsetting energy margins that can be obtained by LCPS. The company says it will have a projected capacity deficit of more than 2,400 megawatts in 2020 without the future capacity additions.
But Logan Atkinson Burke, the Alliance for Affordable Energy’s manager of administrative and regulatory affairs, notes that Entergy Louisiana received approval two months ago for a roughly 1,000-megawatt power plant in St. Charles Parish that will cost about $869 million.
“As soon as they got the OK to do that, they started to ask to build this new power plant on this side, also about 1,000 megawatts,” she says. “The alliance will be following along with this and making sure that if they are allowed to build it—and it may very well be the case that they need this amount of power to serve the industrial growth here—that residents don’t wind up paying the weight of those costs.
The alliance is expecting the PSC to make a decision on the power plant proposal within six months.
