The company’s Black Hills Energy–Colorado Electric arm will idle the W N Clark plant in Canon City, Colorado, at the end of the year. The facility will remain online for peak-demand production through next year.
Also suspending operations due to the state and federal compliance costs are Black Hills Power’s 25MW Ben French coal-fired unit in Rapid City, South Dakota, which will stop work August 31 ahead of a March 2014 plant retirement.
The company’s 34.5 MW Osage and 22 MW Neil Simpson 1 coal-fired plants in Wyoming will be shuttered in March 2014.
Black Hills also said it would idle two units at its gas-fired plant in Pueblo, Colorado.
“After a thorough analysis of new environmental regulations, coupled with changing market and operating conditions, we identified an opportunity to make changes to our resource portfolio by suspending operations at some of our older generating facilities in advance of permanently retiring those plants,” chairman, president and chief executive officer David Emery said.
Retrofitting the facilities with the emissions controls to meet regulations of the US Environmental Protection Agency and Colorado’s Clean Air – Clean Jobs Act, he added, was not economic.
On July 30 Black Hills Energy’s Colorado Electric proposed the construction of a natural gas-fired plant to go online in 2016. That facility will replace the power lost from the closing Canon City coal plant.
Additionally, the company received necessary approvals to build the gas-fired Cheyenne Prairie generating station, which will make up the capacity deficit from the three other coal-fired plant retirements when it opens in late 2014.
Black Hills’ announcement is one of many that have come over the past several months from coal-fired power generators across the nation. Many have stemmed from US Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule issued late last year aiming to reduce mercury emissions and other air pollution from coal-fired plants.
The agency said last month that it would re-review how the rule may affect new plants, but the evaluation would not change the standards for existing plants.
