Tri-State Closing Arizona, Colorado Coal Plants Early, Investing in More Renewables

Power Magazine ^ | December 2, 2023 | Darrell Proctor

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Colorado-based cooperative Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association will accelerate the closure of a coal-fired unit in the northwestern part of CO, and announced a retirement date for an Arizona coal plant.

Tri-State said it wants to acquire at least another 1,250 MW of renewable energy generation over the next several years. The not-for-profit company, which serves rural electricity consumers across four western states, said the ERP filed with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission seeks to take advantage of funding from the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s $9.7 billion Empowering Rural America program, part of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.

The use of funding from the New ERA program will help Tri-State reduce the risks to its customers of higher energy bills due to the costs of retiring stranded assets. Tri-State said economic considerations were paramount in the decision to close the coal plants.

The utility announced it will close the last of three units at the 1,285-MW coal-powered Craig Station in Colorado by 1/1/28. Unit 3 originally was scheduled to close by 12/31/29. The retirements of Units 1 and 2 at Craig (by 12/31/25, and 9/30/28, respectively) were previously announced. Craig 1 and 2 are jointly owned by Xcel Energy, Platte River Power Authority, Salt River Project, PacifiCorp. and Tri-State; Tri-State wholly owns Unit 3.

Tri-State said it will close Arizona’s Springerville Station 458-MW Unit 3 in 2031. The Springerville power plant is a 1,765-megawatt, four-unit generating facility in eastern Arizona near the New Mexico border. Tri-State wholly owns Unit 3, which opened in 2006 and had an expected lifespan of 60 years. Units 1 and 2 at Springerville are owned by Tucson Electric Power, which has said it will close the units in 2027 and 2032, respectively. Unit 4, owned by Salt River Project, has no retirement date.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

The bad power news just keeps coming. Biden is corrupting business decisions with the incredibly stupid "Inflation Reduction Act." Companies are shuttering perfectly good fossil plants to suck up the IRA money. Then the companies have the gall to say that funding will "help the utility reduce the risks to customers of higher energy bills due to retiring stranded assets." The only reason these assets are "stranded" is the God Damned government stranded them with its horrendous energy policy.

They are going to buy new intermittent renewable energy that willl not keep the electrical system running reliably. This is utter insanity.

How can the boards of these companies make these incredibly stupid financial decisions on behalf of their customers and their boards?

Are there NO people with courage at any of these companies that will stand up and say:

• the green crap will NOT work at utility scale;
• there is no utility-scale energy storage that works with wind and solar;
• coal plants are very clean;
• no industry will have reliable power;
• consumers are going to get killed with high prices;
• people will DIE without heat or light;
• power will be intermittent;
• grid collapse is a real and growing possibility;
• manufacturers will flee the high-power-cost and unreliable power USA for other countries costing us millions of jobs;
• China, India and others are not following this suicidal energy policy

The Craig Generating Station has operated in northwest Colorado for more than 40 years. Unit 1 at the coal-fired plant is set to close in 2025, with Units 2 and 3 scheduled to be retired no later than 2028. Courtesy: Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association

[ducttape45]

Idiots, they are all idiots.....

[Tell It Right]

End results: higher bills with less reliable service.

All while the Dims push people into EV's.

[caver]

Isn’t Colorado full of libs? Maybe they need to be thinking of where their power is coming from in 5 years.

[The Great RJ]

Waiting for large scale blackouts next summer. Pity the fools in their EVs.

[Ultra Sonic 007]

When coal/gas/nuclear power generation is the mercy of whatever administration happens to be in Washington D.C. at the moment (which is in increments of four years, far shorter time than it takes to get a return on investment for a new power plant), what sane investor or capital firm is going to bankroll the upkeep or development of new power plants that could be rendered dead in the water with little notice?

All of the government incentives are on the side of renewables, and against coal/gas/nuclear. Public sentiment, foolish (and shallow) though it may be, is likewise on the side of renewables.

The company boards probably see the writing on the wall and are simply saying ‘okay, this is what you all want; you can have it’.

It’s going to suck for a lot of people (especially when they realize how badly solar and wind are going to fare on our grid as they become more common), but that’s the way it rolls when the energy industry is as hamstrung by Washington D.C. as it is.

[Red Badger]

I have read that $0R0$ buys up defunct coal mines after they go bankrupt, for pennies on the dollar.

Is he doing the same with natural gas and coal power plants?..............

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“Maybe they need to be thinking of where their power is coming from in 5 years.”

There isn’t a single prog or lib anywhere in the country that can do that. They also don’t have the intellect to understand cause and effect. Or critically evaluate the consequences of their decisions and alter direction. No, they all double-down on failed policies in the face of certain failure.

[xp38]

Your stupid minds!

[bantam]

couldn’t have said it better!
They are gonna destroy us!

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Yes, this is the big problem with “industrial policy.” Companies get whipsawed every four or eight years when the winds out of DC suddenly change direction. And, as you say, when the planning, design and construction period is 10 to 15 years, there is absolutely no way to do any sensible economic planning.

You’re probably right that the boards see this and finally capitulated to the inevitable. “OK, you want ‘renewables’? We’ll give it to you good and hard, customers be damned.”

[Ultra Sonic 007]

Isn’t Colorado full of libs?

Here's how the 2020 election broke down on a county basis:

Unfortunately, Denver drives most of the politics of the state.

[monkeyshine]

There is no reason to “close” these plants. I can see an argument where a place like Arizona could use more solar investment and maybe it will pay off - maybe. Of course solar only works for about 1/3 of the day, on sunny days. You also need to invest in massive power storage (batteries) basically meaning you need 3x to generate roughly 2x-3x more power from solar than you need each day in order to store the excess for nighttime use.

But assuming best case scenario for solar, other sources of energy should be kept at least minimally operational and ready to ramp up if and when Solar goes sideways, nighttime, rainy days, winters, if demand issues cause spikes in energy use, battery failures etc.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“Unfortunately, Denver drives most of the politics of the state.”

Same with the big cities, capitol cities, and college towns in CA, OR, WA, NM and increasingly TX.

[bray]

For absolutely no reason.

[Tell It Right]

Solar wouldn't work for the grid even in Arizona. For one, there's currently no way to feasibly scale up fossil fueled plants when needed.

For another, there's the issue of demand. Demand is different from total power needed in a day. Demand is how much power is needed at any given moment. As an analogy, think of a water faucet letting water flow out of a large basin. How open the water faucet can go (how fast the water can flow) is like demand in power. How much water is in the basin is like how much total power comes from solar panels and/or batteries in a day.

There's a yuge demand in the afternoons when everyone gets home from work and school at the same time. In the south (including southwest like Arizona) that means that offices are still running their A/C for the people who are still there, while many homes are also running their A/C to cool down as people come home. While the parents run appliances to do household chores they couldn't do while at work, etc. My solar inverters can provide 18kW of continuous AC power from my solar panels and/or batteries, which is almost always all I need for what my wife and I are running -- but she's retired and I work from home a lot. In other words, we don't usually run all of our appliances at the same time to do all of our chores in a brief period. And the AC (variable speed heat pump) rarely runs full blast because it's never really off (letting the house get warm in the summer) and having to rush to cool the house down by the time we get home (because we're always home).

Most people's homes don't operate like that, so my inverters wouldn't be able to all of a sudden provide all of the power they need every afternoon. And that's just the homes. With businesses and hospitals and such the demand is often too out of the park for solar inverters to keep up with.

Nope. The only way solar is practical is with decentralized solar like I have --- and even then it's practical only if all the variables are right for your situation and also if there's a dependable grid available for the times I don't have enough solar and battery storage.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

You need 3X more generation AND you have to build a storage plant to store that for use at night and dark days.

The capital cost estimates for solar and wind almost always conveniently ignore that simple fact.

It's not well known that coal fired power plants must have energy storage, too. But they store the raw fuel (coal) on the ground BEFORE it is converted to electricity. This is so the plant can get through freezes in winter, winter transportation disruptions, and labor disputes. Coal piles can typically feed a power plant for 90 days. The biggest battery storage systems today (all demonstration projects) can store the output of a large power plant for a few minutes at most.

[Long Jon No Silver]

The ‘good feel’ battery obsession just shifts the c02 emissions from the coal fired to the battery storage manufacturer. Which is mostly in China, who build the coal fired stations to provide the energy to make the batteries.

[vpintheak]

Doing it here in the interior of Alaska as well. Friggin green morons!

[monkeyshine]

Those are good points, some of which can be mitigated with smart technology. For air conditioning homes, kick them on at timed intervals (or just traditional thermostat settings for times when nobody is home so the house doesn’t get extremely hot).

Agreed completely that the grid demand is very high between 4pm and 9pm. When you start adding electric cars to the mix, demand will soar (though that too should be done with smart tech so it doesn’t have to kick on until later in the evening - but it will still increase demand at times when no solar is being generated).

Decentralized is absolutely the way to go, but not the way TPTB have centrally planned it. It is less stupidity than corruption I fear. It makes perfect sense to put solar panels on buildings - as many as possible - to power individual homes and feed the neighborhood too as possible. To go out and law panels on 25 sq miles of empty desert is about as absurd as possible a method to use solar when it can be generated, delivered and stored directly to the places of demand. All you need is surface area and homes and industrial buildings have plenty of that.

High use places (hospitals, factories, office towers etc) would need even more creative solutions. And just throwing the switch from coal/gas to electric on X date in the future will work about as well as switching water sources on X date did for Flint Michigan.