Through most of the past decade, rising demand for electricity in the U.S. led utilities and independent power companies to plan, design and build scores of new powerplants.
With an anemic economic recovery and a focus on energy efficiency, now electricity demand is essentially flat, and new plant construction is driven more by federal and state energy policy than by load growth. That summation is the consensus of power generators, contractors and others who say that while some plants fired by coal or natural gas are still being built, policy-makers are providing loan guarantees and other incentives to jump-start the development of new nuclear, clean-coal, solar and wind projects.