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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowAES Indiana said Thursday it plans to invest about $1.1 billion in Pike County as part of its transition from coal to natural gas at its massive Petersburg Generating Station.
The Indianapolis-based electric utility was set to announce the plan at a luncheon for employees and community officials at the generating station, the largest in its fleet, and the only one to still use coal as a fuel source.
The investment would make AES Indiana the first utility in Indiana to abandon the use of coal as a fuel source, if state regulators agree, the company said.
The news comes about five months after the utility announced plans to stop using coal by 2026 at Petersburg and triple its renewables portfolio by 2027.
The Petersburg power plant, about 120 miles southwest of Indianapolis on the White River, has been called a “super polluter” by environmental groups and even by the Indianapolis City-County Council, which passed a resolution in 2017 calling for AES to cut back on burning coal.
The plant, the largest in AES Indiana’s fleet, has racked up dozens of environmental violations for emitting excess sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide particulate matter and sulfuric mist. The coal-fired units have been active since the 1960s.
The new investments include “repowering” Petersburg’s two remaining coal-fired units to natural gas, pending approval from state regulators, and the addition of two new projects, including solar and battery storage.
The new projects, called the Pike County Battery Energy Storage System and the Petersburg Energy Center, will add 180 megawatt-hours of battery storage and 250 megawatts of solar to AES Indiana’s portfolio.
The Petersburg Energy Center is under construction and is expected to be operational by the end of 2025. It will cost $500 million.
The battery storage facility is designed to deliver electricity for four hours, which can help meet energy demand during peak hours. The utility did not provide a timetable for its construction. It will cost $300 million.
The gas conversion of the generation station will cost $300 million.
The utility said they would create about 300 jobs during construction and generate approximately $40 million in taxes and benefits for Pike County over the next 20 years. Petersburg, with a population of about 2,300, is the largest city and the county seat of Pike County.
AES Indiana officials said the projects would provide grid reliability, flexibility and sustainability.
The project aligns with AES Indiana’s 2022 Integrated Resource Plan, which includes transitioning coal-powered units to natural gas and adding wind, solar and battery storage over the next five years.
Testimony from the company filed in December 2022 indicates the utility generates 31% of its energy from coal and 51% from natural gas. AES Indiana expects that natural gas will account for approximately 70% of its resource mix once the Petersburg conversion is complete.
AES Indiana provides electricity to about 500,000 customers in central Indiana. It is a subsidiary of Arlington, Virginia-based AES Corp.
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Wait!?! Aren’t Republicans going to pass a law to mandate they have to keep burning coal?
(sarcasm) Coal is the cheap affordable fuel of choice! (end of sarcasm)
This will be a price increase. Why? All the Democrats demanding solutions to climate change. The utilities are doing what Democrats demand.
Then the Democrats can buy votes by saying they’ll offer government programs. I hope Americans snap out of it.
David, if you like burning coal so much, ditch the natural gas in your home and start burning (wait for it) coal.
I worked for AES for 12 years. If coal was going to be cheaper and more cost effective, they would still be on the coal train. New gas extraction technology has made gas cheaper and coal is dead, even if you could get ANY multinational bank to finance a coal project.
“Coal, it keeps the lights on”
Not since new fracking and drilling technology has made gas so cheap.
Burning coal emits all kinds of nasty things to the air, including radioactive materials, heavy metals, & carcinogens. Living in coal pollution is demonstrably unhealthy. Natural gas doesn’t end up really being any better as far as CO2 emissions are concerned, but it’s a lot better to burn than coal.
+1
Don’t forget about massive coal ash ponds leaking and overflowing. When you burn coal, that ash is the byproduct.
Coal ash has high concentrations of mercury and arsenic, among other nasty things.
Drive down to Madison sometime. Just past Clifty Falls State Park is a coal plant along the Ohio River surrounded by coal ash…if it floods and breaches, all the downstream public water intakes will have to deal with the contamination.
to me this is just rearranging the chairs on the titanic. Its the equivalent of the mafia asking you if you want to drown in the shallow end or the deep end…as in what is the difference between coal and gas. Gas has less pollutants….about 50% less carbon that coal and 30% less than oil. Our energy consumption continues to increase…oil (at least world wide) and electricity (locally and worldwide). The continued computerization of our world will guarantee a continued increase as servers increase in numbers, (just look at what bit coin mining incurs). The increase in electric cars. We can get all the electricity we want during the day from photovoltaic cells and drive down the cost per kilowatt during the day…but our current and near term likelihood of storage of excess electricity for the night time is not there. Also because the disparateness of our grid we are not able to efficiently move excess electricity to other regional locales in need. i fear that at some point…soon…we are going to have an energy shortage…an ability to produce electricity in sufficient quantities at the proper times and in the proper places. There is a certain political party who always talks about how the adults are back in charge….well…let’s hear it from the adults in the room. Natural gas, wind, photovoltaic, hydro (decreasing as dams are being removed) are insufficient to meet our long term needs