Longview, First New W.Va. Coal Plant in 18 Years, Fires Up This Month

The new plant is expected to be more efficient than most coal-fired plants.

Morgantown Dominion Post
10 April 2011
By Pam Kasey

MORGANTOWN -- The first new coal-fired power plant to start up in West Virginia in 18 years will start burning coal this month.

The nearly finished 695-megawatt Longview Power plant north of  Morgantown is the first since the 80-megawatt Grant Town power plant went on line in 1993.

And to be fair, Grant Town and others constructed around the same time are a different class, both small and built at least in part to burn waste coal.

For the last commissioning of a large plant designed to burn freshly mined coal, it’s necessary to go back more than 30 years to 1980, when AEP’s 1,300 –megawatt Mountaineer plant at New Haven went online.

Starting up a new coal-fired power plant is not only a rare event, but a painstaking one.

The plant is now two months into a six-month-long commissioning period.

“Starting Feb. 8, we’ve been going through a stage called ‘steam release,’ where we fire on natural gas,” said Charles Huguenard, Longview Power vice president and general manager.

“In this part of the commissioning, what we do is we build up pressure in the boiler to about 600 pounds per square inch, then we open a valve and release the steam,” Huguenard explained. “That takes little particles out of the inside of the boiler tubing — you do that prior to hooking up to the steam turbine because those particles could damage the steam turbine and hurt the efficiency of the unit.”

Steam release can be loud, Huguenard said, but the company notified neighbors and emergency response ahead of time and has not had any complaints.

Natural gas is Longview’s start-up fuel — it is used to ignite the plant’s primary fuel, coal — and it will burn gas until the steam release phase is completed toward the end of April.

Then, Huguenard said, the plant will hook up the steam turbine and begin feeding coal to the boiler. Aside from the connection to the steam turbine, construction essentially is complete and crews are demobilizing.

But the testing of the plant’s 273 systems will go on into August.

“We’ll go through that even after we introduce coal,” Huguenard said.

“We’ll be synchronizing to the electrical grid, actually generating electricity, that should be first part of May,” he said. “And even after we do that there’s a lot of testing. We should be completely done with all that some time in August. At that point we’ll be deemed commercial operating” — meaning the plant can then bid its power into the regional PJM Interconnection electricity market.

Longview’s power will be inexpensive to produce compared with most other coal-fired plants for two reasons.

One is that it’s more efficient than most: an anticipated 8,700 British thermal units per kilowatt-hour, or heat-units in per electricity-units out, according to Huguenard, compared with a national coal-fired fleet average of about 10,600.

The next most efficient plant in the region has a heat rate of about 9,500, he said.

The second reason Longview’s power will be inexpensive is that the plant’s coal will come from an adjacent Mepco mine, so its transport costs will be low compared with a plant that has to get its coal by rail, barge or truck.

That is why, when Longview first was proposed, one positive that was cited was that it would be a more efficient and environmentally friendly plant than average and would be called on to generate power before old, less efficient and environmentally friendly plants — contributing to the eventual retirement of those plants.

Longview is expected to burn about 2 million tons of coal per year, the great majority of it from Mepco, which is just over the border in Pennsylvania.

The plant will employ 97 people. Huguenard said nearly all of those positions have been filled — most with residents of Monongalia and Preston counties in West Virginia and Greene and Fayette counties in Pennsylvania.