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

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

“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.”

I’d rather you not free.

It would appear that AES is Mike concerned with DEI, then providing folks with the power they need. Yet another casualty in this nonsense. Sad.

AES Indiana is committed to building strength and delivering long-term sustainability through diversity.

I really hope their diversity is enough to keep the lights on.

A modern nuclear power reactor can output steam that is compatible with those existing coal fueled turbines. By modern I mean sodium cooled fast reactor such as the Chinese and Russians both have active versions of.

Jimmy Carter that traitor shut down the integrated fast reactor program for proliferation BS reasons. Well Jimmy Iran,NKorea,China,India,Pakistan all got nukes without ever using IFR technology so your argument was a false flag.

We have the technology today to build in a factory assembly line style IFR sized fast reactors that can directly repower existing coal plants like this one with 90% capacity factors that nukes typically have. The Greens and the NRC refuse to licence small modular factory built reactors. They are slow walking the sodium fast reactor in Wyoming also being built on a former coal site.

Fast reactors burn the other 96% of spent fuel leaving only fission products as wastes that need to be turned to glass and stored for only a few hundred years vs a million for whole spent fuel rods. The other benefit is FR can breed more fuel than they burn extending the fuel reserves for tens of thousands of years.

Nuclear power is the only power source with the magnitude of fuel and capacity factors to run a first world civilization on. Wind and solar do not have the multiple quadrillion BTU per year capacity to ever run civilization on.

Full disclosure the solar panels on my roof cuts my power bills to tens of dollars a month or in summer time negative bills. For individual use on a larger home’s roof footprint they make sense from a grid independence / cost savings view point.

Utility scale solar is and always will be a boondoggle. Same for wind power the capacity factors are simply too low to ever run modern civilization on. There will likely never be low enough cost battery storage to compare on a LCOE basis to nuclear power on a $ per megawatt on demand basis. Don’t fall for the avoidance cost price or curtailment prices. Power needs to be on demand basis what’s the cost right now this instant at peak power usage? When it’s dark,cold and no wind what’s the price of power at that second.

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