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| Street View, Sep 2019 |
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| Sam Carlson posted You can't get this shot anymore! This happened within a month of 30 years ago, and if you saw it now, you'd be stunned! Everything is GONE!!!! (except the tracks) |
This is a popular view for railfans.
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| Greg Mross posted Amtrak's Empire Builder passes Wisconsin Electric's Pleasant Prairie Power Plant in August of 1989. The plant opened in 1980 and was decommissioned in 2018. Demolition was pretty much completed when the last building came down last year [2022]. |
"Unit 1: 616.6 MW (1980), Unit 2: 616.6 MW (1985)....Pleasant Prairie shut down on April 3, 2018." [gem]
Around 2009, Alstom Power installed a process development unit (PDU) for testing their new chilled ammonia process (CAP) for CO2 capture. "The PDU operated at up to a flue gas flow equivalent to 1.7 MWe electric power generation." [1.7/1,233.2 = 0.14%] The process removed 90% of the CO2 and "demonstrated the technical viability of the process." They planned to do additional studies "to evaluate scale-up to a commercial-scale process and will include an economic evaluation." The goal of the project was to "capture and compress CO2 at an increase of less than 20% in the cost of electricity." [epri] I guess the results of the studies were mute because in the meantime natural gas and reusables caused a decrease in the cost of electricity.
This is a view of the PDU. At 3:00 in this video, the field manager for Alstom Power claimed they were treating about 1.5% of one power plant. My computation above is an order of magnitude less than that. So I'm confused.
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| 3:56 video @ 2:35 |
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| Jennifer Cramer White posted P4-The first Power Plant that I started with back in April, 2005 and they shut it down in April, 2018 due to changing energy economics. That includes more utilities using natural gas and renewable energy sources. Basically, with all the WE Coal plants, they produced too many energy credits and were out producing the renewable energy sources on the market. Instead of giving that back to the consumers, by selling that energy to other sources they are forced to shut yet another plant down. I even read that they are being forced to shut down the other units at the SOC plant that I also posted on, that we retrofitted 4 FGD's & SCR'S on back in 2008-2012! "Units 5 and 6 at South Oak Creek would be shut down in 2023 while units 7 and 8 will be shut down by 2024." Pleasant Prairie Power Plant was a 1,233.2-megawatt (MW) coal-fired power station owned and operated by We Energies. Bryan Hitchcock: P4 doesn't even exist anymore. They leveled both boilers this year. My last outage there was in 2016 when when we retrofitted the boilers with waterwall water canons. I loved working there. Jennifer Cramer White: Bryan Hitchcock I know. I was just sharing this as one of the plants that I started at. It's a damn shame they blew it up. It was a great place to work at for sure. I climbed to the top of the new stack that we put in! It was awesome!! Bryan Hitchcock: Jennifer Cramer White I was an apprentice when they did all the back end work. P4 was one of the cleanest coal plants in the nation. Stan Taulbee: We are so screwed.. Jennifer Cramer White: Stan Taulbee yes sir we are!! When you take all the energy sources and break them down from availability, where we get the minerals/fuels from (if they have to be imported or can we get them from the USA) how they are sourced, such as fracking, or coal and then take the longevity of each power source over time and maintenance and disposable/reusable parts of the equipment, and don't forget the concerns over nukes. Then take the cost of each power source and effects to the environment, which one do you think is less harmful? My bet being in this business for over 17 years and doing my own research would be wet scrubbers (due to the complete recycling of all materials ran through the plants) and Hydro. IMHO. |
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| Kurt Schroeck posted Wisconsin Electric, Pleasant Prairie Plant '80's |
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| wecenergygroup-history Construction of the first 580mw unit, which went online in 1980. In 2006, this unit set a new site record on 517 days of continuous operation. |
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| BaneNelson [I could not find a date as to when this rotary coal car unloader was installed.] |
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| Apr 24, 2018: EnergyNews, Credit: Google Earth [I wonder how they got an image that good from Google Earth.] "We Energies customers ask to recoup costs from shuttered coal plant" [When I saw that headline, I had assumed the issue was stranded assets. But the issue is that the utility rate includes fuel costs as though the plant operated through 2019. During extensive rate negotiations, We Energies never bothered to mention that they planned to close the plant. But then the article did discuss stranded costs. The plant still has $681m on the books. Plus "Ratepayers are also billed for about $300 million worth of pollution controls installed in the 2000s."] |
Shareholders are not expected to share the burden of stranded assets. In fact, rate payers are not only supposed to pay for the now worthless assets, they are expected to pay a RoI to the shareholders of 10% for those assets!
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| eenews, Credit: We Energies/MCT/Newscom "We Energies shut down the 1,200-megawatt Pleasant Prairie coal-fired power plant last spring, but consumers are being asked to pay nearly $1 billion over the next 20 years to pay off the remaining balance on the plant and a return to utility shareholders....Milwaukee-based We Energies said customers will nonetheless save money — a lot of it — compared with what they would pay if the plant had continued to run. The utility estimates net savings of $2.5 billion, mostly in avoided operating and maintenance costs and capital investments. The group doesn’t dispute that We Energies should get to recover its investment in Pleasant Prairie, which served customers for more than three decades before changing market forces made it uneconomical. But the group is questioning whether the utility should earn a 10% return on that investment, an amount that exceeds $350 million, if the plant is sitting idle." [Talk about abuse of rate payers, a 10% RoI during an era of a Federal Tax Rate of 0% is rather extreme in the first place.] "In deregulated states like Ohio, companies must write off the plants’ value (unless they get subsidies). That’s what American Electric Power Co. did in 2016 when it wrote off $2.3 billion to align the value of its Ohio generating fleet on its books with the actual market value." [I never did find out how much the customers have to pay for a kwh. It did say that Wisconsin already has the second-highest retail electric rates in the Midwest.] "A potential solution to accomplish those goals is securitization — refinancing higher-cost debt with low-interest, ratepayer-backed bonds." |
ShepheredExpress summarizes the pay of 10% RoI on worthless assets as: "Why Are We Paying We Energies $430 Million in Profits on a Coal Plant That Shut Down Last Year?"
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| PowerMag, Courtesy: Washington Group International [They added NOx and SO2 scrubbers in 2007.] |
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| tmj4, Photo by: Scott Paulus/Milwaukee Business Journal WE has torn everything down so that they could sell the land for $226m. "“There are just so few opportunities to find large industrial sites in particular throughout the region that includes most of Chicago to build larger-scale warehouses right now,” Driscoll told the Milwaukee Business Journal. “Wisconsin continues to be a huge benefactor of that overflow of demand and the lack of availability, particularly in the north side of the Chicago market."" |
WE also has to properly close their ash landfill.
The plant employed roughly 150 people. [wpr]
The site is served by CP/Milw on the west side and UP/C&NW on the east side.
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| PleasantPrairieWI "Dermody Properties will be required to extend 80th Avenue from 95th Street into Lot 2, ending in a cul-de-sac. The extension will include public sanitary sewer, storm sewer, and water main. Other stormwater management facilities, including four stormwater basins will be constructed." |
Hopefully the new development includes falcon nest boxes. This was in the Spring of 2018.
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| cbs58 "Three falcon chicks were recently born at a nest at We Energies' Pleasant Prairie Power Plant. The nest still has one more egg left to hatch. We Energies says there are more eggs waiting to hatch at their other nest boxes. " |
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