OREGON, Ohio — The past and present, at least in terms of how Ohio generates electricity, can be found within a few miles along the shores of Lake Erie.

Pressed up to the edge of the water is the Bay Shore Plant, a coal-fired power plant owned by a subsidiary of Akron-based FirstEnergy that rarely runs and is scheduled to be closed by 2020.

Sitting two miles inland is the Oregon Clean Energy Center, a natural-gas-fired power plant that opened last summer and is running most days. It’s owned by Clean Energy Future of Massachusetts, a company that focuses exclusively on building and operating these types of plants.

“We are the next iteration of technology,” said Peter Rigney, the plant manager, referring to how the gas plant takes up less space, has fewer employees and generates less waste than coal or nuclear plants.

Oregon Clean Energy is part of a building boom, one of 11 natural-gas plants built, under construction or in some phase of development in Ohio. Investors are spending billions of dollars on plants that will take advantage of the region’s inexpensive and plentiful natural gas.

People who manage the electricity grid are trying to figure out the risks of increasing reliance on natural gas as old coal and nuclear units are closing or likely to close. At the same time, the people behind this slate of projects tend to downplay the risks and say natural gas will remain plentiful and inexpensive.

Don’t look down

Wearing a hardhat and safety glasses, Rigney gives a tour of a complex that is at once sprawling — covering 30 acres — while also much smaller than an equivalent coal or nuclear unit. The plant has capacity of 900 megawatts, which can provide for the needs of more than 750,000 houses, according to Clean Energy Future.

The inside of the plant looks like the set of a sci-fi movie, with big open spaces nearly devoid of people. The floors are concrete and metal, including lots of metal grate floors, catwalks and open metal stairways. If you don’t like heights, don’t look down through the floor.

This is a “combined-cycle” gas plant, a term that refers to a two-part system. First, the plant uses natural gas to spin a turbine and make electricity. A separate system captures the excess heat and uses it to make steam to run a generator that makes additional electricity.

When Rigney says his plant is the future, he means it is built to work in a regional power grid that will get an increasing share of electricity from wind, solar and other intermittent sources. Until there is large-scale technology to store wind and solar power for later use, the grid will need a fleet of plants that can kick in to meet demand at times when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.

Natural-gas plants are capable of ramping up in a matter of minutes and also are able to adjust their output during the day, which means they work well in combination with other sources.

Also, there are benefits for the environment. While natural gas is a fossil fuel that contains pollutants, it burns much more cleanly than coal. In Ohio, where gas plants are coming online and coal plants closing, there is already a notable improvement in air quality.

But there are risks as the grid shifts to rely more on natural gas — both for energy companies and consumers.

Energy-industry veterans need only look back about 20 years to see another surge in gas plants that quickly proved a bad idea, leading to a wave of business failures and stalled projects as gas prices rose so much that they made the plants less competitive with other fuels.

The question today is whether the fundamentals have changed so much – with a seemingly endless supply of gas from domestic shale deposits – that a new set of rules applies.

“Everyone talks about how inexpensive natural gas is going to be, but if you look at the late 1990s, everyone was saying the same thing,” said David Littell, a former Maine utility regulator and now a principal at the Regulatory Assistance Project, a nonprofit group that advises utility regulators.
“There’s a history of people being wrong on natural gas,” he said.

At the same time, William Siderwicz, the chief executive of Clean Energy Future, says the risk of a gas price spike is so low that “no one spends a minute thinking about it.” Like Littell, he speaks with the expertise of decades in and around the energy business.

There also is a broader risk when natural gas is serving as the country’s main fuel for home heating and for power plants to make electricity. The economy would be vulnerable to disruptions in the gas supply because of weather, such as a very cold winter that could create high demand, or natural disasters, such as tornadoes, that could damage supply lines.

This is the risk that helped to inspire the Trump administration’s recent plan, since rejected by regulators, that would have provided incentives for coal and nuclear plants because those sites have weeks of fuel on site.

A quiet boom

What is it like to live near a gas plant? Dan Steingraber, 60, lives about a mile from the Oregon plant and runs his own real-estate appraisal business. He sees the plant when he drives by it, but doesn’t see, hear or smell it from his house.

He likes that the power plant is there because it means jobs and investment for the region, he said. The plant employed hundreds of construction workers while it was being built. The regular staff is about 25, with most functions handled through automation.

Oregon, located just east of Toledo, has a large industrial area. It has a BP fuel refinery and the FirstEnergy coal plant, both of which have much larger footprints than the gas plant. The industrial history of the community is another reason that there has been almost no local opposition to Oregon Clean Energy.

“I grew up in East Toledo, so we’ve always had refineries,” Steinbraber said. “People say, ‘What’s that smell?’ and if you grew up in East Toledo, you say, ‘It smells like money, it smells like jobs.’”

Oregon Clean Energy was the first of new gas plants to open in Ohio, with operators flipping the switch last June. It was followed in January by Carroll County Energy, just outside of Carrollton, developed by Advanced Power, a Swiss company with U.S. offices in Boston.

Two more plants are under construction and likely to open this year: Middletown Energy Center in the city of the same name, developed by NTE Energy of Florida; and Lordstown Energy Center in the Youngstown-Warren area, developed by Clean Energy Future.

Next come projects that are more speculative. Those developers are aiming to open in 2020 or later.

At the bottom of the list is a plant near Circleville, being developed by NTE Energy. The company has done work to prepare to file for a state permit but has not done so. Tim Eves, senior vice president of development for the company, said the project is on hold in part because of some short-term factors.

The larger point is that not every announced project will be built, based on examples from previous building booms, said John Moore, who writes about environmental issues related to the power grid for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“None of these developers want to be the last one playing musical chairs before the (electricity) prices get so low that they can’t make money,” he said, referring to how low prices could result from having more power plants than the market needs.

In Oregon, Rigney says his plant, and others like it, can succeed in the market because they have high output relative to the costs to operate. Amid ups and downs in electricity and natural-gas prices, he thinks the plant is well-positioned to compete.

“This is absolutely the future,” he said