Employees Rally to Save Power Plant and Their Jobs
February 6, 2023 - Employees of West Virginia's Pleasants Power Station are making their best pitch to save the plant and their jobs. The present owner of the plant intends to close it at the end of May after they were unsuccessful in trying to sell the coal fired facility.
Craig Straight has worked at the plant for more than 23 years and is a third generation employee. Speaking on Friday’s MetroNews Talkline, he said they don’t believe the attempt to sell the facility came at the right time. He said the attempt to sell came as Covid created chaos in the business world and soon afterward Russia invaded Ukraine and wrecked the market for natural gas in Europe. Both events caused the sudden inflation of coal prices on the spot market and killed any hopes of selling the plant for the time being.
But Straight said things have now changed and the prices of coal has eased a bit.
“What we’re hoping for is one of the previous suitors will find a coal contract and negotiate and purchase the plant,” Straight told MetroNews.
Workers have another plan they are also hoping will hold up. They want to use a case before the West Virginia Public Service Commision in which the Consumer Advocate’s analysis indicated the plant was a valuable resource to keep power to West Virginia customers available and affordable.
“The consumer advocate, whose sole purposes is to protect the rate payers of West Virginia, testified they believed it was in the best interest of the rate payers for Mon Power and Potomac Edison which serve the eastern panhandle and northern part of the state to purchase the Pleasants Power Station to add to their generation. We’re concentrating now on pursuing that PSC case,” he explained.
But the aging coal fired facility gets a lot of grief as companies attempt to turn away from traditional fossil fuels and look toward alternatives for the future. The trend toward green energy has weighed hard on facilities like Pleasants. It’s the reason the present owner wants to shed the asset, but Straight said the nation isn’t ready to run solely on wind and solar–or even natural gas at this point.
“You only have to go back to the bomb cyclone of the Christmas holiday weekend to see what’s happening to our country. PJM, the grid operator for this region, at one point was 2,000 megawatts shy of what they needed to meet peak load that day. If Pleasants was already closed, they would have been an additional 1,300 megawatts shy,” he said.
Straight said the plant is capable of powering more than one Million homes. The facility is also equipped with the Selective Catalytic Restriction System or “SCR” commonly called a “scrubber” to clean pollutants from emissions as they are released. Other plans are forced to buy credits for such pollution while Pleasants’ SCR system is capable of actually creating those credits. He said they are encouraging Mon Power’s purchase would enable the company to keep the reliability and capacity of not only the Pleasants Power Station, but also their Fort Martin Power Station. Also a coal fired facility, Fort Martin does not have the SCR technology and must currently buy the credits.
The Pleasants Power Station, according to the workers provides 154 jobs to the region. It’s Pleasants County’s single-largest tax payer with $1.7 Million annual contribution to the local school system. Straight said the plant generates $460 Million in economic development to the state and creates more than 700 coal jobs for West Virginia by annually burning three Million tons of West Virginia coal.
But even with those stats, Straight said the bigger worry is the plant represents the fabric of the community which they don’t want to lose.
“We’re not just taxes and jobs or concrete and steel. This plant means something to our community. It’s woven into the fabric of our community. It’s more than just a power station,” he explained.
Straight said they have created a Save Pleasants Power Facebook page in hopes of rallying support to sell and save the plant.