“We continue to have serious concerns about the potential impact these plant retirements—and retirements of generation announced by other utilities—will have on the reliability of the electricity grid,” said Nicholas K. Akins, AEP president and CEO. “Our retiring units were required to run to meet peak demand last summer, and little new generation is scheduled to come on line prior to the retirement dates to replace this lost generating capacity.”
In its notifications with PJM and SPP, AEP confirmed the following unit retirements:
- Conesville Plant Unit 3, Conesville, Ohio – 165 mw;
- Big Sandy Plant Unit 1, Louisa, Ky. – 278 mw;
- Clinch River Plant Unit 3, Cleveland, Va. – 235 mw;
- Glen Lyn Plant (two units), Glen Lyn, Va. – 335 mw;
- Kammer Plant (three units), Moundsville, W.Va. – 630 mw;
- Kanawha River Plant (two units), Glasgow, W.Va. – 400 mw;
- Muskingum River Plant Units 1, 2, 3, 4, Beverly, Ohio – 840 mw;
- Picway Plant (one unit), Lockbourne, Ohio – 100 mw;
- Philip Sporn Plant (four units), New Haven, W.Va. – 600 mw;
- Tanners Creek Plant Units 1, 2, 3, Lawrenceburg, Ind. – 495 mw; and
- Welsh Plant Unit 2, Pittsburg, Texas – 528 mw.
In addition to the generation retirements, AEP plans to install or upgrade emission control systems on more than 13,000 mw of capacity, a task made extremely difficult by the tight compliance deadlines in the EPA rules and the uncertainty about the process for deadline extensions, Akins said.
“The timing and logistics of these major projects, in addition to routine maintenance outages across the system, will increase demands on the remaining generating units,” Akins said. “We believe additional time to complete the emission control retrofits and coordinate the retirement schedules would better balance the environmental, economic and other impacts of this transformation of the nation’s generating fleet.”
