According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the largest coal-fire power generating plant in Pennsylvania is seeking approval from PJM to close by July 2023.
The 54-year-old Homer City Generating Station provides power to Pennsylvania and New York. The plant’s owner is looking for approval from PJM, the grid manager in the region, to retire. If approved, the 1,888-megawatt plant will join a growing number of coal-fired plants across the country to retire. Since 2005, coal-fire power generation has shrunk from 313 gigawatts to 196 gigawatts.
Designed to provide base-load power, the Homer City plant was built before the turn of the century and has operated on a nearly continuous bases to meet the minimum power needs of the region, officials said. For the past 30 years, the plant has operated at a near 90 percent utilization rate.
In 1999, the plant was sold for $1.8 billion during a time when the state was deregulating its electricity market. Coal-fired generation then accounted for more than half (53 percent) of the nation’s power supply, with natural gas accounting for about 12 percent. Now, those roles have reversed with natural gas supplying 40 percent of the electricity in the United States and coal providing only about 20 percent.
New emission standards for power plants under the Clean Air Act required the Homer City plan to install FGD scrubbers on the three units between 2001 and 2014. Then pollution control upgrades cost the plant owners an estimated $750 million in 2014. A bankruptcy in 2017 forced an ownership changes for the plant.
EIA said that as natural gas plants grew in number, the Homer City plant switched to load following power instead of base load. The change increased the annual maintenance costs for the plant, on top of the debt it had incurred from pollution control upgrades.
As the plant generated less electricity, its annual capacity dropped to 82 percent in 2005, and to 20 percent in 2022, which led to the decision to retire the plant, officials said.