How old coal mines and abandoned power plants are being converted into renewable energy sites

Fast Company ^ | December 5, 2023 | Robert Zullo

[ProtectOurFreedom]

12-05-23

Across the country these sites are becoming fertile ground for renewable energy projects, from wind and solar to battery storage.

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AES Indiana’s Petersburg Generating Station, which towers over the White River in southwest Indiana, has been burning coal to generate electricity since the late 1960s. That era, though, will come to an end soon. Two of the power plant’s four coal-burning units have already retired and the last is planned to shut down in 2025.

“AES Indiana will be the first utility out of coal in the state,” says Kelly Young, a spokeswoman for the company, which has more than half a million customers in the Indianapolis area.

AES Indiana’s Petersburg Generating Station will shutter all of its coal-firing units over the next few years. Power generation, however, will continue. Two of those coal units will be switched out to cleaner-burning natural gas, and the company is also building an 800-megawatt-hour battery storage array at the Petersburg plant to take advantage of the existing grid connections and meet its electric capacity obligations. It will bank power when prices and power demand is low and discharge it when demand climbs and the regional grid operator, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), needs the juice for the electric grid.

Aaron Cooper, the company’s chief commercial officer for U.S. utilities, says the company opted for batteries after an exhaustive review of its obligations to its customers and the larger grid (especially under MISO’s new winter rules that require more reserve margins) while also taking into account the costs and specifications of available generation technologies and new favorable tax rules for renewables as part of its long-range planning process.

AES’s project isn’t alone. Those same factors, along with the increasing resistance to new greenfield wind, solar, and storage development, as well as massive backlogs in the queues to connect new power projects to the grid, mean former mine lands and the plants that burned the coal they produced are increasingly attractive spots for new renewable development.

Conversion of old coal plant sites to new storage and renewable projects is happening in New Jersey, Nevada, Louisiana, and elsewhere across the country.

“Reuse of these interconnections is critical to driving down the cost of replacement generation,” says Justin Tomljanovic, a VP of corporate development at Xcel Energy, which has 3.1 million electric customers in eight states and is building two battery arrays near retiring coal plants in Becker, Minnesota, and Pueblo, Colorado.

“We’re thinking about this at every single place where we’re retiring a coal plant,” Tomljanovic says. “It is a company strategy that we think enables us to hit our carbon goals and our states’ carbon goals cost effectively.”

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Petersburg Generating Station is a major coal-fired power plant in Indiana, rated at 2.146-GW nameplate capacity. Units 1, 2, and 3, rated at 281, 523, and 671 MW, were put into operation in 1967, 1969, and 1977 respectively. Unit 4, rated at 671 MWe, was put into operation in 1986.

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The stupidity is absolutely breathtaking. They are shutting down 2,100 MW of nameplate generating capacity that probably ran with an average capacity factor of 65%.

The battery storage system at the same power plant site is rated at 800 MW-h. If the batteries spend 12 hours a day charging and 12 hours a day discharging, and can discharge 80% of their full charge, then the batteries can deliver a constant 53 MW over those 12 hours. A lot of good that does replacing 2,100 MW of GENERATION.

They will need FORTY of these battery storage systems to deliver the same power that the ONE Petersburg coal-fired power plant could deliver at any hour of any day throughout the entire year.

Yet the execs quoted in the article are gloating over being the first coal-free utility in Indiana!

Note, too, that the article says people DO NOT want these things built in their backyards.

“Reuse of these interconnections is critical to driving down the cost of replacement generation,” says Justin Tomljanovic, a VP of corporate development at Xcel Energy

Justin, you jerk! If you really want to keep power prices low, you'd keep the EXISTING coal generating fleet of plants running. Note that he is saying they want to drive down the cost of the REPLACEMENT generation fleet. If they weren't kissing ass to the GD meddling government, they wouldn't have to be building replacement generation in the first place.

All you Michiganers, please tell us how things are going for you there.

[bray]

Communists are really good at solving imaginary problems.

[Tell It Right]

Two of those coal units will be switched out to cleaner-burning natural gas

It's hard to keep up. Are the Dims now saying natural gas is a good thing? They're changing their minds on pushing or blocking natural gas about as much as they've done in my lifetime regarding nuclear.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Or...Communists are really good at CREATING imaginary problems then coming up with IMAGINARY solutions that won’t work to solve the imaginary problem they created.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Exactly right. They have NO constancy. Everything is opportunistic to further the revolution.

We all heard it before with “War is peace; Freedom is slavery; Ignorance is strength.”

[Organic Panic]

“Paper bags are destroying the forests”
“Plastic bags are destroying the forests”
“Paper bags are renewable and save the forest.”

[qaz123]

Probably bad to say, but I hope the people being serviced in that area, absolutely freeze this winter. I want burst pipes and all sorts of shenanigans.

I don’t want anyone to die, but a high level of discomfort is A-OK with me.

Has anyone in that region done any research on how all of that “green nonsense” worked out for Texas a while back?

[Bonemaker]

Will just be converting them back again eventually.

[Bonemaker]

“It is a company strategy that we think enables us to hit our carbon goals and our states’ carbon goals cost effectively.”

[vpintheak]

We’ve got plenty of idiot a-hole leftists up here in Alaska too. The utility board of directors is shutting down our largest coal plant with hundreds of millions in debt on it yet, to get wind power and battery storage.
As they cause the rates to skyrocket, they will pat themselves on the back thinking they’ve saved the planet. Fools. Utters fools.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

No kidding. I HATE it when I read crap like “our carbon goals and our states’ carbon goals.”

The greeniacs made these “carbon goals” without any proof that they are needed or will be efficacious. The fed gov plus the state govs arbitrarily set these “goals” and the corporate boards and their faddish ESG fealty rapidly fell in line.

They never justify these “goals.” They never say how much money it will take to achieve them. They never say what the end-result will be of meeting their “goals.” They just say “we have these [completely arbitrary] goals and we are going to meet them.”

This is the most utterly insane world imaginable.

[Bonemaker]

It is evil madness!

[GrumpyOldGuy]

What a crock. Total BS.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“What a crock. Total BS.”

No kidding. Turning productive old coal mines and power plants into crappy battery storage facilities that 1) won’t have any power source to charge the batteries and 2) don’t store enough energy to do diddly squat.

When I was in the power industry, we had technically savvy engineers who could do serious, adult power system planning and engineering. We could design highly reliable systems that kept your lights on almost 24x7x365.

Those days are all gone. Now the idiots at the top of the energy companies down down to FedGov and Greeniacs. There is no serious thinking through the long-term consequences of their stupid decisions or how many people will die without reliable, low-cost power.

[redangus]

Since I’m one of those people and have no control over what AES does, I’d just as soon not freeze.

[AZJeep]

Indiana has been blessed with large coal deposits!
Coal is actually the biggest energy resource, especially for the USA.
US has the largest, by far, known reserves of coal in the world! No wonder, coal is being targeted the most!

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“I’d just as soon not freeze”

I understand that. Why don’t you write to the board of AES telling them what a disastrous mistake they are making?

[PLMerite]

I remember when we went through that horsesh!t the first time. They eventually came up with “biodegradable” bags that were supposed to, well, biodegrade.

Now they’re b!tching about the plastic bags again.

[redangus]

I’ve written emails to them before about such things. It obviously did a lot of good. AES doesn’t even answer their phones when you have an outage. I’m sure their board reads every email from a concerned customer.

I’m sure you understand they are a monopoly. They are the only source of electrical power for our area. It’s not like I can call them and cancel my service and hook up to their competitor. This isn’t cable vs satellite.

That’s why we have a whole house NG generator. My wife is on 24-hour oxygen therapy and needs electricity for her equipment. If every battery is fully charged and all her tanks are full, she could go about 9 hours without electricity. So, as long as the gas company doesn’t do stupid stuff like this, I guess she’ll survive, but wishing for people to freeze this winter is really pretty heartless on your part. Not everyone is as financially secure as we are. Generators are expensive. If you get your wish some will not only freeze, but possibly die when their medical equipment can’t be powered. Might want to think about that next time you consider making a statement like that.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“That’s why we have a whole house NG generator.”

Us, too. We installed it 25 months ago for two reasons:

1. A Canadian utility was making a play for Avista and the Canucks were fully committed to “green” which meant unreliable, high-priced power in the future. Avista’s mild “green” commitments were absolutely bad enough as it was. Unfortunately, Avista is our supplier of BOTH electricity and NG. But I figure NG will be more reliable and available longer than electricity (fingers crossed there).
2. We are surrounded by lots of trees and we get frequent outages after big storms. The longest outage around here has lasted ten days for the unlucky few. We want to be prepared for that.

Our energy supply system is in complete disarray and is a pending disaster because these idiots are pursuing a chimera.