Cleaner Power In Line To Join West Virginia’s Grid On The Scale Of Coal

There’s a lot of cleaner power waiting to come on to the system in West Virginia.

Members of the legislature’s Joint Standing Committee on Energy and Manufacturing were told Thursday that more than 12,000 megawatts of power will be added to the grid in the next several years.

That includes about 10,000 megawatts of renewables and 2,000 megawatts of natural gas.

Combined, that’s nearly as much as the entire footprint of coal in West Virginia of 12,500 megawatts.

Asim Haque, vice president of state policy and member services for PJM, the grid that includes West Virginia and 12 other states, explained that it’s not a 1-for-1 replacement.

Some coal and natural gas will still be needed on account of the intermittent nature of wind and solar.

“And so we’re trying to balance both the infusion of these intermittent resources and also maintain system reliability,” Haque said.

PJM has a systemwide backlog of 252,665 megawatts in its interconnection queue, the line for new power resources to join the grid.

More than half of that is solar. Much of the rest are wind and battery storage. Only 5,537 megawatts of natural gas are in the queue, and no coal.