photo by: Orlin Wagner, Associated Press

The Lawrence Energy Center produces power behind Shirks Barn near Lawrence on Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021.

The lifespan of Evergy’s Lawrence power plant was extended this week until at least 2028.

In a reversal of course, the integrated resource plan the electric utility filed with Kansas and Missouri regulators on Thursday proposes moving the retirement date for Lawrence Energy Center’s coal unit to 2028. The plan also calls for converting another unit in the plant from coal to natural gas power by 2028.

Both changes are pushed back four years from the proposed dates in Evergy’s 2022 integrated resource plan, which planned for the same changes by next year. This isn’t the first time the retirement date for Lawrence’s plant has been pushed back, though; in 2021, the plan called for the Lawrence Energy Center to be shuttered by the end of 2023, but Evergy walked those plans back later in the year in favor of converting units at the facility instead.

On Thursday, the Sierra Club decried the plan not only for its extension of the Lawrence Energy Center’s lifespan but also for lowering its planned solar and wind installations in Kansas during this decade.

“It’s maddening that Evergy said it would close its Lawrence coal plant two years ago, yet here we are with the utility committing to burn fossil fuels at the plant years beyond the original plan,” Nancy Muma, a volunteer with the Kansas Sierra Club’s Wakarusa Group, said in a press release. “That’s not a decision utility leaders make while proclaiming to care about climate change and the cost to its customers.”

Integrated resources plans are mandated every three years by state utility commissions for companies like Evergy to forecast how the utility will meet energy demand over the next 20 years.