Coal-fired Homer City power plant closing; future dim for 2 other regional facilities

The iconic Homer City coal-fired power plant, with its four tall smokestacks and three cooling towers north of Route 22 in Indiana County, will be shutting down over the next three months.

Two other coal-fired power plants in Indiana and Armstrong counties could be following the same closure path in the next several years.

Homer City Generation LP said last month its decision to close the 54-year-old plant in Center Township was driven by the low price of natural gas, a spike in the cost of its coal supply, unseasonably warm winters and tightening environmental regulations.

The closing at Homer City is a reversal of an announcement that was made last April. At that time, the company said it intended to continue to operate the 2 gigawatt facility, which has about 130 employees and can supply power to about 2 million residences.

The Homer City plant will join more than 60 other coal-fired plants that have closed in Pennsylvania over the past two decades, the company said. While the plant is the state’s largest coal-fired plant in terms of capacity, it was not the most productive in terms of generating coal-fueled power.

That distinction goes to the Keystone Generating Station some 20 miles away in eastern Armstrong County. That plant made the state’s top 10 in terms of power generation for 2021 by transmitting 7.4 million megawatts, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.

Homer City was not among the top 10 power generators in the state in 2021 and had been operating at just around 20% capacity. It produced 4.4 million megawatts in 2021 and even less (3.3 million) in 2022, according to the Energy Information Administration. By contrast, the power produced at the plant in 2019 — before the covid-19 pandemic — topped 6.8 million megawatts.

Its coal usage dropped accordingly, falling to 470 million tons last year compared to 538 million tons of coal in 2019, according to EIA data.

NRG Energy of Houston, which operates the plant with its employees but is not part of the ownership group, said the layoffs will be phased beginning on or about July 1. Those workers will have the opportunity to apply for open positions within NRG, and NRG will provide transition assistance and severance in accordance with NRG policies and the applicable union contract, said company spokesman David Shrader.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 459 in Johnstown represents workers at the plant. Barry Hixson, IBEW Local 459 business manager, could not be reached for comment.

The company would not elaborate on the closing.

While the ownership group cited environmental regulations as a factor in the closing, the Pennsylvania Clean Air Council indicated there are more factors at play.

“Power plants are retired for many reasons, including no longer being able to compete in the market with more efficient resources. In Pennsylvania, the story for over a decade now has been that of one fossil fuel — methane gas — displacing another — coal,” said Robert Routh, policy and regulatory attorney for the Clean Air Council, based in Philadelphia.

Regulations cited

Stricter environmental regulations also were the reason the owner of the coal-fired Conemaugh Generating Station in East Wheatfield, Indiana County, and Keystone in Plumcreek, Armstrong County, planned to stop production.

Keystone-Conemaugh Projects LLC, the plants’ owner, said in November 2021 that it would idle those plants by the end of 2028 as a result of tougher regulations on disposing the toxic coal ash generated when a power plant creates steam to turn the electric-producing turbines.

Talen Energy Corp. of The Woodlands, Texas, which owns a 22% stake in the Conemaugh plant and 12% ownership of Keystone, has said it wants to shed its wholly-owned ownership of coal-fired power plants.

Rising maintenance costs and the age of a plant also are relevant factors, Routh said, because each unit at Keystone and Conemaugh was commissioned at least 52 years ago — past the average operating age of coal units nationally.

Closing the 1,770-megawatt Conemaugh plant and the 1,700-megawatt Keystone plant would mean the loss of about 200 full-time workers at each site, according to Olympus Power LLC of Morristown, N.J., which has both plants in its portfolio of operations it owns and manages.

The plants also support hundreds of affiliated jobs, about 100 trucking jobs as well as employment for Pennsylvania miners, Olympus Power said.

A spokesperson for Keystone-Conemaugh Projects could not be reached for comment.

The timing of the closing may be a result of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s finding in January that denied Conemaugh’s request to continue dumping coal ash into unlined impoundments without proper management, Routh said.

Carbon tax plan blamed

Penalties placed on power plant owners based on pollutant discharges under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative also would severely limit Homer City Generation’s ability to plan long term, the company said. Pennsylvania joined 11 other states last year in a market-based effort to cap and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

But the battle over then-Gov. Tom Wolf’s decision to have Pennsylvania join the RGGI is on hold as opponents have fought it in Commonwealth Court, which imposed an injunction last year. Republican legislators and a coalition of coal producers, power plant operators and labor unions took the case to court.

The state Department of Environmental Protection, the target of those lawsuits because the agency would implement and enforce the RGGI carbon cap regulations, declined to comment.

The Pennsylvania Coal Alliance, a Harrisburg-based coalition of coal producers and mine equipment suppliers, blamed the Homer City closing on what it called “poor policy decisions,” including the threat of the state joining the RGGI “carbon tax scheme.”

The environmental organization Clean Power PA said Homer City Generation mistakenly points the finger at RGGI for the closing, but “the truth is that this closing, like the Cheswick coal plant closing last year and the many other coal plant closings across the state in the last two decades, was not about RGGI, but brought on by larger forces, as the energy market shifted from coal production to cheaper renewables and fracked gas.”

For as much as clean energy advocates cite the environmental harm that coal-fired plants create, the alternative energy sources of wind and power in Pennsylvania are nowhere near replacing coal’s power-producing capabilities. Solar and wind turbines like those seen along the Allegheny Mountains in Cambria and Somerset counties generated 3.6 million megawatts of electricity in the state in 2021 compared to the 126 million megawatts of power that coal created in the same year, according to the EIA.

The Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection Association — a 13-state power grid that transmits electricity generated by Homer City — will study the impact of a generator deactivation, said Jason McGovern, spokesman for PJM, which is based near Valley Forge.

McGovern said PJM will study whether the retirement of the plant will impact reliability of the system and what, if any, enhancements are needed on the electrical grid.

Homer City’s future

Indiana County officials have been working with the Homer City Generation team on the future of the site, and the county would be open to redevelopment possibilities, said Byron Stauffer Jr., executive director of the Indiana County Office of Planning and Development.

If the company were interested in converting the plant from coal fired to one that uses natural gas as its fuel, Stauffer said, the county two years ago was awarded a $1.5 million grant from the state Commonwealth Financing Authority’s Pipeline Investment Program to extend a natural gas line to the county’s Route 119 business park near Coral. That park is less than 2 miles from the power plant.

But converting a coal-fired plant to one using natural gas would be expensive, said Rachel Gleason, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coal Alliance.

A coal-fired plant operator would need to produce a detailed, site-specific engineering analysis to determine viability of the conversion, Routh said.

“It would take years,” he said, “and gas plants typically require far fewer employees to operate.”