The Healy 2 Coal Fired Power plant is poised to restart. The Golden Valley Electric Association plant has been offline since March, when an explosion in its coal pulverization and transport facility damaged equipment. The incident was the latest problem for the long troubled facility that Golden Valley hopes will provide low cost energy.
Golden Valley electric association president and CEO Corey Borgeson said repair work at the Healy 2 plant have been completed and firing of the boiler is imminent.
”It’s a matter of two or three weeks,” Borgeson said.
Borgeson said he recently met with contractors and staff at the plant to get an update on months of works since the March explosion at the plant’s coal handling facility. The incident was pre-cursored by 2 similar blasts during plant testing in 1999, when the experimental facility was owned by the state. Borgeson said a forensic analysis by an outside firm of this spring’s explosion identified 3 interacting factors.
“It’s not that concrete or black and white where you could say it was operator error, controls or warning systems,” Borgeson said. “It was kind of a combination of all three.”
Borgeson said the findings were addressed with several projects over the last 6 months.
“The controls have been changed for the coal handling system. Additional warnings have been put in place. Additional monitoring of CO2 system has been put in place. And additional training for all operators of the plant.”
Borgeson totaled the cost of repairs at $3.5 million, all but five hundred thousand of which is covered by insurance. The remainder will be recouped in customer rates. The 6 month shutdown included a planned 3-month break for installation of new emissions controls the utility agreed to as a permit condition after it purchased the plant from the state in 2013. Borgeson said the system will reduce stack output of nitrous oxide.
“It’s a fairly complicated system where you take the exhaust that’s coming out of the plant and you treat it with a lime and also with urea,” Borgeson said. “And they have catalysts and so it treats the exhaust. And then it goes back into the exhaust and goes out into the air having captured a significant amount of Nox emissions.”
Nox emissions are precursor to health threatening fine particulate pollution. Borgeson said the emission control system cost 93 million dollars, bringing the GVEA’s total Healy 2 investment to 175 million dollars. The state and federal government originally spent over $300 million to build the facility. Borgeson noted that the cost of operating the 50-megawatt plant is projected to be among the lowest in the rail belt.
Dan Bross is a reporter at KUAC in Fairbanks.
