Nevada power plant to close after dispute

AP ^ | 12/30/5

[SmithL]

LAUGHLIN, Nev. - A large coal-fired power plant will close at the end of the year rather than violate a court-ordered deadline to install an estimated $1.1 billion in pollution-control measures.

Southern California Edison said Thursday the Mohave Generating Station, at the center of an environmental dispute several years ago, would close. The plant has provided the utility with 7 percent of its electricity, but the company said its 13 million customers would not be immediately affected because of other power sources.

Under a 1999 consent decree won by environmental groups, the aging Mohave plant was required to upgrade its pollution controls or close by Jan. 1, 2006.

The groups had argued the 1,580-megawatt plant, about 100 miles south of Las Vegas, had repeatedly violated the Clean Air Act, contributing to haze at the Grand Canyon.

The utility, the plant's majority owner and operator, had hoped to keep it open as natural gas prices have continued to rise.

In a filing Thursday with the California Public Utilities Commission, Edison said it planned to continue negotiations aimed at keeping the plant open but expected to close it for at least a few months. The environmental groups have said they would not agree to a deadline extension.

The plant is the only customer of the nearby Black Mesa mine, which provides about 160 jobs to members of the Navajo Nation. The mine, run by Peabody Energy Corp., will likely be forced to close.

"It was the environmental groups that helped bring this about - for altruistic reasons, of course - but the result is that a lot of breadwinners are going to be out of work," said George Hardeen, a spokesman for the Navajo Nation.

Environmentalists said they sympathized with the tribes, but argued Edison had plenty of time to fix the plant's pollution problems. Edison should invest in renewable energy sources on tribal land, which would benefit the people "who have been exploited all of these years by the greater metropolitan centers of the West," said Roger Clark, director of the Grand Canyon Trust's air and energy program.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Utilities can pass through these costs to their rate payers. Taking 1500 mw off line doesn't make sense.

[oyez]

Why do I suspect that those responsible for the shut down live nowhere near Mohave Generating Station?

[Lester Moore]

Edison should invest in renewable energy sources on tribal land, which would benefit the people "who have been exploited all of these years by the greater metropolitan centers of the West," said Roger Clark, director of the Grand Canyon Trust's air and energy program.

Except, dear Roger, Edison & Peabody are not welfare, make-work corp.'s

There ain't no money in your "invest in renewable energy sources on tribal land" plan.

[Lester Moore]

Watch the headlines, somebody will install scrubbers on this.

I don't think so, because Peabody has been battling the Navajo Nation and enviro's for some time over it's coal mining and tremendous use of water to transport it's coal to Edison's plant. The coal mine has been in the cross hairs for years & years and was, I think, going to end up shut down anyway. Edison, having no readily available coal for their plant, was going to have to shut down.

The enviro's got a two-fer out of this.

[Dog Gone]

Utilities can pass through these costs to their rate payers. Taking 1500 mw off line doesn't make sense.

In a deregulated electricity market, you can't just pass along the costs. You're competing against other power plants. You can't just jack up your rates to cover the cost or customers will get their power elsewhere.

The question Edison had to ask itself is whether making a $1.1 billion investment was going to make a satisfactory rate of return. I don't know what the profit margin at this plant is, but it undoubtedly would take many year's profits to pay back that $1.1 billion.

Edison would be infinitely better off to shut the plant down and buy Treasury Bills with that billion bucks.

[savedbygrace]

Note that the AP doesn't actually name the watermelons who filed the suit. To the AP, they're just cute fluffy forest creatures who travel around making people happy every place they go.

[BipolarBob]

Maybe so, I have no specific info on Mojave at hand, but I daily keep up with the generation buisness. But I know a station that large with a nearby available coal supply would not let scrubbers come between them and staying operational. If there are other killers to the deal, it may not be feasible. Many times fuel transportation cost is the largest expense to a coal-fired plant.

[nightdriver]

"rather than violate a court-ordered deadline to install an estimated $1.1 billion in pollution-control measures."

Scrubbers reduce the undesirable emmissions, they don't eliminate them.

After the utility floats bonds and make other crippling committments to this reduction in emissions, all the enviro-nazis have to do is get one of their old hippie judges to move the decimal point one or two more places to the left on allowables and the utility has to go through the whole thing again.

It appears that the real aim of the enviros is control, not the environment.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

A 1500 MW coal plant has to be higher on the dispatch list than any natural gas plant. I think Edison could get the job done for a lot less than $1.1 billion, especially with the new manganese based flue gas scrub technology now coming on line.

[Dog Gone]

Perhaps so, but whatever it might cost is still going to have to be viewed by the company as a capital investment and whether it makes financial sense.

In the meantime, they face a hard deadline of Saturday night and nothing is going to change that.

Edison will also gain by receiving pollution credits under an EPA program which it will be able to sell to other utilities.

Closing the plant is not a bluff. It's a business decision in response to environmental activism.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

That's a fact, Jack.

[Mr. Jeeves]

It was the environmental groups that helped bring this about - for altruistic reasons, of course...

LOL! It amazes me how many people still think:

1) Altruism = noble self-sacrifice rather than sacrificing somebody else to advance your own interests.

2) Environmentalists act for the benefit of anything but their own interests.

[RaceBannon]

I work for one of the outside power companies that works on devices to generate power that power companies used to have people on site do.

Service...Jobs that only Americans can do...so far....

[Iris7]

A 1600 MW coal plant burning low sulfur Western coal will consume about 54 tons of coal a minute (not hour). Think 80,000 tons of coal a day.

A scrubber will evaporate and lose to the air about six pounds of water per pound of coal so scrubbers at the Mohave plant will evaporate about 500,000 tons of water a day at full load.

There are other water losses involved besides evaporation having to do with the gypsum type sludges discharged by the process. The total water consumption is about 700,000 tons or about 169 million gallons of water a day. The water will have to come from somewhere, and must be fresh water (salt water is much harder, read expensive and polluting).

700,000 tons of water a day is about 22,500,000 cubic feet per day or enough water to require a two foot diameter steel pipe flowing full speed. At the published San Diego water consumption rate this is the water required by 375,000 households and the commerce that supports them.

[Dog Gone]

Well, I guess the plant will be closed for awhile then. LOL.

[antiRepublicrat]

The question Edison had to ask itself is whether making a $1.1 billion investment was going to make a satisfactory rate of return.

The plant's already been running for 34 years, so can't have too much of a life left in it. That $1.1 billion (for a plant that cost $214 million to build, still less than a billion in today's dollars) won't be spread out over too-long a time, maybe only 10 or 20 years.

[Iris7]

Your remark about manganese process scrubbing led to Enviroscrub and the Pahlman process. Interestingly their "our technology" site area contained only this diagram:



No technical details whatever were given. No consumption rates, no description of the technology, no cost estimates, nothing. The 2,000 cubic feet per minute demonstration trailer has a toylike capacity but looks to be an overweight load. The process appears to consume a large volume of water although probably less than wet scrubbing. the reaction reagents are proprietary. Rather looks like a catalytic process with associated catalyst poisoning problems, etc. Makeup water strangely needs RO. Reagent is electrolytically regenerated. Looks like high energy consumption and maintenance costs.

Am I seeing this wrongly?

http://www.enviroscrub.com/index.asp

[Eric in the Ozarks]

I think they have a couple full size scrub units on line at Minnesota Power. Can't say why they haven't updated their web page. They claim the manganese is recycled and there is no need for a big sludge pond. Power consumption is much less than a typical scrubber, which I'm told can consume 25-30 percent of the power plant's production.

[Iris7]

Combustion turbines consume negligible water. The $14 per million Btu natural gas fuel cost at a major fuel hub can be passed on to the consumer by government edict. At 50% efficiency (pretty high) wholesale fuel cost is five cents a kilowatt hour at the generator.

Figure on fuel only cost at the wall socket from natural gas combustion turbines at eight to ten cents per kilowatt hour. Total aggregate cost per kilowatt hour is unknowable in advance but one can say that electricity will cost five to ten cents per kilowatt hour more than last summer for combustion turbine generated electricity.

Mohave has been producing cheap electricity that will now have to be replaced with marginal electricity bid up in price by those who want it the most.

[Dog Gone]

The $14 per million Btu natural gas fuel cost at a major fuel hub can be passed on to the consumer by government edict.

It could, but that's that's the opposite direction of where we've been moving.