As demand for clean energy surges, would-be developers are struggling to find enough transmission lines to carry power to the people. One increasingly popular solution: retired coal plants.
Much as a special-purpose acquisition company offers entrepreneurs quick access to public markets, a retired power facility offers renewable energy producers a back door onto the grid. Denmark’s Orsted AS, for instance, is developing a 1.1-gigawatt wind farm off the New Jersey coast that’s expected to go into service in 2024. The turbines will be at least 15 miles (24 kilometers) from shore, and Orsted plans to connect them to the grid at two onshore sites, a coal plant that retired last year and a nuclear plant that was shuttered in 2018.
Terrapower LLC, the advanced nuclear technology company founded by Bill Gates, is also currently evaluating four Wyoming coal plants owned by PacifiCorp’s Rocky Mountain Power unit and expects to select one this year as the site for its first 345-megawatt demonstration reactor.
“These are communities that already have a power plant,” said Chris Levesque, chief executive officer of Terrapower. “You already have that ready transmission connection.”
Besides transmission infrastructure, Levesque said converting a coal plant means there’s already water infrastructure, necessary for cooling both coal-fired power equipment and nuclear reactors. The plant also likely comes with a skilled workforce that can be retrained with relative ease.
