As coal-fired power plants switch off, Pennsylvania looks to bring in new businesses.
If the closed Mitchell Power Station on the west bank of the Monongahela River ever turns into anything industrious again, a sweeping 78-page document commissioned by the state economic development agency might have something to do with it.
Like hundreds of coal-fired power plants across the country, the former FirstEnergy Corp. facility 18 miles south of Pittsburgh shut down in the last decade. It couldn’t compete with cheaper energy sources, lower demand and stricter air pollution rules.
After 65 years in operation, the Washington County facility last made electricity in 2013.
These days, Bill Staley of Finleyville, who spent his career at the plant, sometimes avoids driving by it. Mitchell, he said, “used to be a shining beacon,” lit up like a small city, and now its emptiness looms.
“It is just this huge, hulking plant that is rusting away,” he said. “It would be nice if they could do something with it.”
Several environmental, economic and policy factors conspire to keep Mitchell in a limbo status that real estate developers call “cold and dark” — secure, vacant and slowly decaying in the communities that benefited and made sacrifices to host it.
The Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development hopes the redevelopment document might break the spell.
The playbook — the first in a series planned for closed Pennsylvania coal plants — is written to inspire developers’ interest in reusing the shuttered Mitchell site and the surrounding 800 acres of woods and fields mounded with mining waste rock and a coal ash landfill.
“We want to engage with the development community in a meaningful way and get these sites back into reuse,” said Denise Brinley, the agency’s senior energy adviser.
“We have a lot of work to do. There’s a lot of them.”
According to the Sierra Club, 268 coal-fired power plants across the nation have retired or announced specific plans to retire since 2010 — or more than half of the plants operating at the end of the last decade.
In Pennsylvania, 11 power plants have shut down coal-fired generating units since 2010 and another three have converted to run on natural gas.
Closed coal-fired power plants in Pennsylvania since 2010
Eleven power plants in Pennsylvania have shut down units that burned coal to generate electricity. Some of these sites continue to generate power from other types of fuel.
More closures are certain and other shifts likely: The 105-megawatt Colver waste coal plant in Cambria County has set a September 2020 date for retirement. Talen Energy has committed to switch from burning coal to gas at its 1,400-megawatt Brunner Island power plant in York County by 2028.
And FirstEnergy, whose competitive power generation subsidiary filed for bankruptcy last month, has said it will close the massive 2,500-megawatt Bruce Mansfield coal-fired power station in Beaver County and its other plants in Pennsylvania if it can’t find a buyer.