Coal news and updates

Two coal plants in Ohio part of AEP closings

By the end of May, American Electric Power will shut down seven coal-fired power plants. Two others are in the process of being converted to run on natural gas.

The actions are a follow-through on plans announced in 2011 and then updated since then, necessitated in part by federal clean-air rules.

In Ohio, the closings affect one big plant and a small one: the Muskingum River plant in Washington County, with 1,440 megawatts of capacity, and the Picway plant south of Columbus, with 100 megawatts. A megawatt can provide for the needs of about 1,000 houses.

Columbus-based AEP has issued layoff notices for more than 250 employees at six of the plants.

“Since the time we announced the retirements four years ago, we’ve worked very hard to try to place as many impacted employees as possible in other positions at the company,” said Tammy Ridout, an AEP spokeswoman, in a statement. “Many have other jobs within the company that we’re holding for them until the plant closes.”

The remaining workers will be offered severance packages, and many of those employees are retirement age, she said.

Outside of Ohio, the following AEP sites will close by the end of May: the Sporn, Kammer and Kanawha River plants in West Virginia, the Tanners Creek plant in Indiana and the Glen Lyn plant in Virginia.

In addition, two plants — Big Sandy in Kentucky and Clinch River in Virginia — are shutting down their coal-burning systems and converting them to burn natural gas.

The nine plants have about 6,000 megawatts of capacity, which is 16 percent of AEP’s total capacity.

Environmental groups have applauded news of the closings and noted that some of the plants date to the 1950s and are big polluters.

“The public will hardly miss these old coal plants’ mercury, ozone-smog, acid-rain, greenhouse-gas and mercury vapors,” said Jack Shaner, assistant director for the Ohio Environmental Council, in an email.

At the same time, AEP and other electricity companies have said that the mass retirements of power plants could make the grid less reliable, and have lamented the job losses.

PJM Interconnection, the company that manages the grid in a multistate territory that includes Ohio, has said that the system will have enough capacity to handle projected demand.

The Picway plant is an outlier, the smallest and least-used in the group. It has been available at times of high demand but has not been used since mid-2013, AEP said. The plant has no full-time staff members. The small crew that works there is officially part of the staff at the Conesville plant in Coshocton County.

source: http://www.dispatch.com