Texas Commission Approves El Paso Electric’s 228-Megawatt Natural Gas Power Plant

The Texas Public Utilities Commission on Oct. 16 issued an order allowing El Paso Electric to add a 228-megawatt natural gas-fired generating unit to its Texas-based Newman Power Station. The project is expected to come online in 2023 at an expected cost of $143 million.

By the end of 2022, El Paso Electric plans to retire a combined 196 megawatts of capacity of two Newman units built in the 1960s and Rio Grande unit which entered service in 1958. With these retirements, the addition of the new plan – Newman unit 6 – will result in a net increase of about 32 megawatts in the company’s gas-fired generation fleet.

Based on anticipated generating unit retirements and reserve margin criteria, El Paso Electric’s 2017 and 2019 annual planning processes indicated the need for additional capacity with daily cycling ability of about 50 megawatt by 2022 and 320 megawatt by 2023. El Paso Electric continues to provide bundled, regulated service to its Texas customers, as retail competition has not been implemented in its service area.

Subsequently, the company issued a solicitation in June 2017, which elicited a range of proposals from solar-powered, solar-plus storage, gas-fired, wind powered, and demand-side resources. The company’s self-build proposal consisted of a natural-gas-fired combustion turbine built in simple-cycle configuration at the existing -Newman generating station, located on about 175 acres in the City of El Paso in northeast El Paso County.

The estimated amount of allowance for funds for the new unit – Newman unit 6 – during construction is $16.4 million, for an overall estimated total cost of $157.6 million, excluding associated transmission interconnection costs or other transmission upgrades.