New transmission lines from southern Ohio will enable FirstEnergy to shutter two older coal-fired power plants -- Eastlake and Lake Shore -- this fall.
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FirstEnergy's Eastlake power plant coal-fired boilers will close this fall but the facility will live on with two "synchronous condensers," high-tech equipment that will help stabilize power flows over the regional grid.AKRON, Ohio -- FirstEnergy Corp. will close its Eastlake and downtown Lake Shore power plants this fall rather than next year as planned.
All 165 employees will be offered jobs at other facilities. About 15 to 20 will remain at Eastlake to operate new electronic equipment designed to keep power flows stable on the high-voltage grid.
PJM Interconnection, the non-profit company responsible for maintaining the stability of the grid in Ohio and 12 other states, on Thursday approved the shutdowns a year ahead of schedule.
A PJM spokesman could not be reached but documents from PJM's transmission expansion advisory committee -- confirmed by FirstEnergy -- show the closings were approved.
The move should lower the cost of power in Northeast Ohio because the company has been collecting up to $3.7 million a month since Sept. 2012 to keep the power plants ready to generate electricity when needed. PJM has paid the company to keep the plants open, using money it collected by slightly raising transmission rates.
When the plants have run, any profits the company earned were subtracted from the $3.7 million standby fees, said FirstEnergy spokesman Todd Schneider.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, called the early closures good for ratepayers and the environment.
"We have been urging PJM to review its need for these plants for many months so we're pleased that PJM has done the review and will end the expensive RMR payments one year early," said John Moore, an attorney with the NRDC's Sustainable FERC Project.
But elimination of the old standby fees may be offset by charges connected to the construction of new transmission lines. Here's why.
FirstEnergy announced two years ago that it would close the old coal-fired power plants by September 2012 rather than spend money upgrading pollution control equipment to remove mercury and other toxic metals from the smokestack emissions -- as required by U.S. EPA clean-air rules that had been announced a few month earlier after a decade of study.
PJM said it could not allow the closings because the plants were needed to keep the Northeast Ohio grid stable. PJM then agreed to pay the company the extra money to keep the plants operational until at least June 2015 if FirstEnergy immediately began building new power lines and substations to bring power to the area from power plants in southern Ohio.
The company is spending several hundred million dollars to do that, investments for which it expects to be able to convince the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to increase transmission fees.
Because PJM expects those upgrades to be completed this year, PJM concluded that the old plants would no longer be needed to keep the grid stable.
