Ohio Gas Plant Project in Jeopardy if Nuclear Power Bill Passes

Nuclear Power Industry

POWER staff report that New York City-based LS Power on July 15 said it would end a project to expand its natural gas-fired Troy power plant in Ohio if state lawmakers pass legislation to subsidize the state’s two nuclear power plants. LS Power in a news release Monday said, “Handouts to nuclear plants jeopardize the economics of the other already economic generators, including the Troy facility, which could chill investment and lead to the unintended consequence of reduced reliability for Ohio’s electric generation fleet.”

LS Power has said it would spend more than $500 million to add about 500 MW of generation capacity to the 640-MW Troy plant in Luckey, Ohio, which it acquired from Dynegy in 2017. The company has said the plant’s expansion would create hundreds of construction jobs, and add about 20 permanent positions to the plant’s existing staff.

The Ohio Senate Energy and Public Utilities Committee was scheduled to meet Monday to resume debate on the nuclear subsidy bill, House Bill 6, which passed the State House of Representatives in May.

FirstEnergy Solutions (FES), a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp., owns Ohio’s two nuclear plants—the 908-MW Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, and the 1,268-MW Perry plant northeast of Cleveland. FES, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2018, has said it would shutter both nuclear plants, which have been uneconomic for several years, by the end of 2021 unless Ohio officials provide financial assistance to keep the plants in operation.

Four states in recent years have enacted programs to subsidize nuclear power: Connecticut,Illinois,New Jersey, and New York. FES on July 1 said it would work with Ohio officials to keep its reactors in operation, even though a subsidy bill was not passed by the company’s June 30 deadline to buy fuel for the Davis-Besse plant. FES then said it wanted a nuclear bill passed by July 17, when the full state Senate is expected to be in session. FES has said closing the Ohio reactors could costs as many as 4,300 jobs.