Holcomb — One of the three coal-fired power plants scheduled to be built in Finney County has been put on hold.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association Inc. announced this week that it would delay construction of the second of two units it planned to build south of Holcomb. Instead, the Westminster, Colo.-based company plans to pursue other natural gas and renewable energy plants to serve customers' immediate needs.
Hays-based Sunflower Electric Power Corp. is building the two 700-watt units and a third unit of its own.
All three units are to be built near Sunflower's 360-megawatt facility south of Holcomb. Sunflower currently serves about 118,000 customers with the one coal-fired plant.
"Tri-State is closely monitoring its power supply needs, pursuing natural gas and renewables, and has concluded that a delay of their second unit is in their member cooperatives' best interests," said Earl Watkins, Sunflower's president and chief executive officer.
Tri-State's other planned 700-megawatt power plant remains on schedule to be commercially available by 2013.
The third 700-megawatt power plant planned for the site - to be built by Sunflower, Golden Spread Electric Cooperative and Midwest Energy - is expected to be commercially available in 2012.
Under an agreement with Sunflower, Tri-State will take 100 megawatts of the generating capacity from that plant to serve its member cooperatives.
Comments
hornhunter 10 years, 5 months ago
Some of Tri-States members complained that they didn't need the new plants. But not long ago, they ( Tri-State) needed more power to meet their needs so they went on the open market to buy the needed power. Boy, did the members pay the price then! So lets build more gas fired plants and deplete the gas fields until there is now more gas, which is not to far in the future, then we will all pay the price when we need to heat our homes.
THIS IS A GREAT CHOICE. Thanks goes out to the Tree Huggers
snowWI 10 years, 5 months ago
Kansas does not need this electricity. However, the region is part of the tri-state electric cooperative. 90% of the electricity from the proposed plants would go to other states, especially in the sprawling front range of Colorado. Kansas needs to raise funds to build more transmission lines in western Kansas to build more large-scale wind farms. The proposed plants would have NO TECHNOLOGY AVAILABLE TO REDUCE CO2 EMISSIONS OVER THE LIFETIME OF THE PLANT. Regulation of CO2 from power plants may happen in the near future.
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