Boardman to be shut down by 2020?
January 18th, 2010 by Jim JustPortland General Electric Co. is preparing plans to shut down Boardman – Oregon’s only coal-fired power plant – by 2020 – 20 years earlier than previously planned. The plant burns strip-mined coal shipped in by train from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, and accounts for about 25 percent of the power generation owned by PGE. Boardman is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon.
Jeff Bissonnette at Blue Oregon points out this is a very big deal. Boardman may be the first baseload coal plant in the nation to be shut down.
The Boardman coal plant is located about 150 miles east of Portland and provides a baseload output of more than 500 megawatts. Under the existing plan, huge investments would be required to control pollution – which would do nothing about the plant’s carbon emissions. If global warming legislation or a carbon tax were to be enacted, the resulting high price of its electricity might force the plant to close anyway. Based on its analysis of carbon and natural gas prices, PGE believes that a 2020 shutdown would be the low-cost, least-risk plan for utility ratepayers and shareholders.
The earlier shutdown needs approval from the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
PGE is proposing to fill the gap left by Boardman’s closure with two new gas plants: a base-load unit adjacent to the existing Boardman coal plant and a smaller unit next to its existing gas plant in Clatskanie.