Coal news and updates

 

The two electric plants that dominate the skyline east of Orlando have generated reliable power for the city and a stream of cash for City Hall.

 

But the twin titans of the city-owned Orlando Utilities Commission burn coal, which has fallen out of favor, and that makes the future of the middle-aged machines uncertain. The utility has even begun to simply turn one of them off from time to time.

 

To keep the two coal-burning plants viable for as long as possible, OUC is converting them to do what they were never meant for: running partly on natural gas, which is cleaner and cheaper than coal.

 

"What we've been able to accomplish is pretty unique," said Jan Aspuru, the city utility's vice president for power resources, describing a plant redesign he thinks has never been tried to such an extent elsewhere.

 

What's happening with the two coal plants, the pride of the Curtis H. Stanton Energy Center 14 miles east of downtown Orlando, is a microcosm of what's at play nationally.

 

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Coal is blamed for acid rain, smog and mercury pollution, and is a leading source of carbon, a greenhouse gas driving climate change. Utilities are under pressure to ditch the fossil fuel.

 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is pushing regulations that would sharply reduce carbon discharged by new coal plants. Environmental groups are campaigning to shut down older plants, including two near Crystal River run by Duke Energy, Metro Orlando's biggest utility.

 

Overall, utilities in Florida are shunning coal, according to a report this month from the Union of Concerned Scientists and Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. Their research found that power plants consumed 14.5 million tons of coal in 2012, or 35 percent less than in 2008.

 

"That's what happens when another fuel, natural gas, becomes relatively cheaper," Alliance spokeswoman Jennifer Rennicks said.

 

But the utility industry has embraced natural gas aggressively, and today in Florida there is more electricity available than needed. Utilities — including OUC – are occasionally turning off the least profitable plants.

 

Even so, the city utility is far from giving up on the two plants, which cost nearly $2 billion in today's dollars and are now 18 and 27 years old. The units were built with advanced pollution controls and inward-curving cooling towers more associated with spare-no-expense nuclear plants.

 

For many years, they were the backbone of OUC's contribution to the city's general fund, $70 million a year or more since 2006, making them a source of municipal revenue surpassed only by taxpayers.

 

For many years, they were the backbone of OUC's contribution to the city's general fund, which has been $70 million a year or more since 2006 and surpassed as a source of municipal revenue only by taxpayers.

 

At full throttle, Stanton units put out enough power for 750,000 homes, or six times as many homes as Orlando has, but a lot of the wattage goes to other cities and commercial users.

 

To prevent the plants from turning into obsolete hulks, OUC has engineered a way to feed them a blend of natural gas and powdered coal. It's not the best use of natural gas, which is consumed far more efficiently by two other OUC plants designed to run on the fuel.

 

But now the coal plants can run at varying speeds, rather than just at full throttle as originally designed. That allows OUC to slow them to a jog when demand for electricity drops.

 

Aspuru said the coal-burners serve as a kind of insurance should prices rise for natural gas — which is getting growing scrutiny for environmental impacts — or if the supply of gas is cut by something like a pipeline failure.

 

The decline in use of the two units has been steep. Their power output last year was half of what it was in 2010, a record year for the plants. But they are still chugging along.

 

As colder temperatures took hold last week, and demand for electricity rose, OUC restarted the older of the two units that had napped through more than three weeks of mild weather.

 

 

Source: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/