Could the Hatfield's Ferry plant see a reboot?

By Anya Litvak, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 5, 2016

Although few in the electric power industry could believe that FirstEnergy Corp. would follow through on its promise to close Hatfield’s Ferry — a huge coal power plant in Greene County with $700 million worth of relatively new pollution control equipment — the company shut the doors in October 2013 and stamped the plant retired.

But quietly, the Ohio-based utility has been making plans for a possible reboot. In a process begun in 2014, FirstEnergy is now asking the region grid operator for permission to start supplying power from Hatfield’s back into the grid in summer 2019.

The future of the 1,700-megawatt plant may depend on the price of natural gas, or how the current menu of environmental regulations shakes out in court, or on any other factors currently being considered by engineers and number crunchers to determine if restarting the plant makes sense.

Hatfield’s Ferry is the only shuttered plant out of 11 that FirstEnergy has closed across Appalachia since 2011 that the company is evaluating for a restart and it’s the one with the most potential for future use, according to spokeswoman Jennifer Young.

She said FirstEnergy is working through an engineering study to, once again, consider retrofitting Hatfield’s Ferry to burn natural gas along with coal. If it decides to go through with that plan, the plant won’t be ready until June 2019.

The company is also studying restarting it as a coal plant or converting it entirely to gas.

“This really was about keeping the options open,” Ms. Young said. “We haven’t done any work to restart that plant.”

Hatfield’s, near Masontown, was shuttered at the same time as a smaller, 370-megawatt Mitchell Power Station in Courtney, with FirstEnergy blaming low electricity demand, cheap natural gas and environmental compliance costs for the closures. About 380 people lost their jobs at the facilities, though the company found many of them replacement work at other sites.

Andy Sinclair was one of them. He worked as an instrument controls technician at Hatfield’s before it shut down. He now works at West Penn Power, which is also owned by FirstEnergy.

A few months ago, when Mr. Sinclair was invited to have breakfast with FirstEnergy’s CEO Chuck Jones, he said he asked Mr. Jones what the company had in mind for Hatfield’s and was told there were no plans to reopen the power station. He didn’t know about the company’s current studies or about its request to the grid operator.

“I can’t believe I didn’t hear about this until today,” Mr. Sinclair said. But he had heard of rumors of engineers wandering through the plant last winter to assess the possibility of restarting it to run on coal and gas. “I heard they got up to so much money that it was out of control,” he said.

FirstEnergy said as much two years ago. Jim Lash, president of FirstEnergy Generation, told legislators in 2013 that the company had already evaluated adding natural gas to the mix at Hatfield’s and determined it wouldn’t be economical. On at least one occasion, Mr. Lash said it would be cheaper to build natural gas power plants from scratch than to convert a coal plant to co-fire with gas.

“That was a snapshot in time and things do change over time,” Ms. Young said this week. It could be that retrofitting makes more sense now, she said, but the company isn’t far enough along in its evaluation to make that call. “It’s been three years now and market conditions have changed,” she said.

What also changed was how PJM Interconnection Inc., the regional grid operator that coordinates the flow of electricity for 13 states including Pennsylvania, ensures that there is enough generation in the grid to feed demand in future years. After a push by generators, with FirstEnergy at the front of the pack, PJM revamped its process to favor more predictable, baseload generation.

The PJM changes are a positive for FirstEnergy, but Ms. Young said that hasn’t been enough to compel the company to buy new generation or think about restarting shuttered plants quite yet.

Hatfield’s Ferry was outfitted with scrubbers before it was acquired by FirstEnergy in 2011 as part of the Ohio company’s takeover of Greensburg-based Allegheny Energy Inc. The scrubbers were designed to keep sulfur dioxide emissions from the air and have the added effect of reducing mercury emissions.

Ms. Young said that in order to comply with the mercury emissions rules that went into effect last year, the plant would need additional investment. She said an exact figure isn’t available.

“Conversion to another fuel type would require significant investments as well,” she said. “It’s too soon to speculate what future operation of the plant might entail.”