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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowDuke Energy Corp.’s massive, $3.5 billion power plant in Edwardsport produced no electricity from coal in April, May or June, instead switching to natural gas as fuel during a prolonged maintenance period.
The Plainfield-based utility told state regulators in a filing this week that the plant in June produced no energy through a process called coal gasification, a technology that uses coal, water and air to produce combustible synthetic gas to fire steam-driven turbines and create electricity.
That’s even though the plant bought 35,000 tons of Illinois basin coal during June for use in the plant.
The report followed two earlier monthly reports from Duke Energy that the 578-megawatt plant did not produce electricity using gasified coal.
The plant is capable of using two types of fuel to generate electricity: synthetic gas from coal and natural gas. But that capability made the plant hugely expensive to engineer and build, sending it far over its original estimated budget of $1.9 billion.
The utility said it shut down the plant’s coal gasifiers during April, May and June for prescheduled maintenance outage during a 10-year inspection. The plant went into service in June 2013.
“The 10-year inspection is definitely a part of what contributed to the length of the outage, but 90-day outages can and have occurred at power plants previously,” Duke Energy spokeswoman Angeline Protogere told IBJ in an email.
She said the plant operated on natural gas during the three-month period. The two gasifiers have since returned to service, she said: one July 10 and the other around July 22, just before the heat wave.
“Edwardsport has provided power to its Indiana customers during crucial times, such as last week’s heat wave when the plant operated near its full capability on gasified coal,” Protogere said.
Still, the lengthy shutdown of the plant’s gasified-coal operation irked a consumer group that says Duke Energy could have built a similar-sized power plant for less than $1 billion without the coal-gasification technology, which requires regular maintenance and is costly to operate.
“Ratepayers could have saved billions in costs if (Duke) had just built a gas plant, which is exactly what it’s been for most of 2023,” Kerwin Olson, the group’s executive director, said.
Duke Energy said the plant has been offline only about 20 hours total this year. Last October, it set a record of 363 days of continuous operation. Still, the plant has a troubled maintenance history. In 2016, it shut down almost completely for nine weeks for maintenance work, about three weeks longer than expected, during which workers dealt with one surprise after another, including corroded pipes, leaky valves and faulty thermocouples.
Protogere said the plant’s multiple-fuel system is a “critical advantage,” allowing it to switch when one fuel or another is in tight supply.
The plant is in Knox County, about 100 miles southwest of downtown Indianapolis.
Duke Energy is the state’s largest electric utility, serving 820,000 customers in 69 of Indiana’s 92 counties. It is a unit of Charlotte, North Carolina-based Duke Energy Corp.
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Three months of so called planned maintenance!!!!!! Duke blowing their proverbial gasification snake up the 820000 ratepayers hind ends. What a crock!!!! And, the “surprise after surprise” maintenance issues tells me the engineering design and construction of the plant was slipshod; obviously so because of the cost overruns. Oh, and the cost overruns, we just now know of we’re apparently due to adding dual-fuel source to the plant. Talk about another surprise. And now, 3 months worth of so-called maintenance surprise is likely just Duke’s way of recouping their monies for the construction cost overruns. Yes, as usual, sneaky Duke sticking the ratepayers again. How many design engineering errors and omissions were incurred at Edwardsport and as such those were all just simply accepted by Duke? Pass ‘em along to the ratepayers, they’ll never know any better. When will IURC start playing hardball with Duke? Buddy-buddy relationship in the way, I suppose. What other surprises are we going to get slammed with from Duke coming out of their boondoggle Edwardsport fiasco? And, to the IBJ writer, I wouldn’t be to proud to claim that Duke is Plainfield-based. All the decision making comes out of the home offices in North Carolina. Monopolies always win.
Energy generation and transmission should be under public ownership.