Duke Energy has announced plans to tear down the old Edwardsport power plant, the oldest such plant in the state dating back to 1918. The small coal-fired plant was taken off line in the spring. Duke spokesman Lew Middleton said the work will begin next month. The company hopes to have its new, $3-billion coal-gasification power plant online by September of 2012. Sun-Commercial photo by Gayle R. Robbins
EDWARDSPORT — It’s been a fixture on the horizon in northern Knox County for almost 100 years, a monument, really, to the deep debt the county owes to coal.
Next month, Duke Energy will begin to tear down the plant, which hasn’t been in use for months and is now dwarfed in size by the new, state-of-the-art $3 billion coal-gasification plant being built next door.
Lew Middleton, a company spokesman, said Duke will need the property on which the plant now sits to store coal slag (essentially what’s left after coal has been burned) from the new plant.
“The intent all along has been to market the slag and given how the markets can fluctuate we knew we were going to need space to store it,” he said.
Middleton said that there had been some talk a few years ago of the plant possibly being turned into some type of museum, perhaps chronicling the history of coal and coal-fire electricity generation.
That had been an idea former Duke executive Jim Turner had tossed around.
“There had been some talk of that, I think, but of course those were days when the economics were a lot better than they are now,” Middleton said.
The Edwardsport power plant went online in 1918, the first electricity generating plant of large scale in the state, built by the Indiana Power Company to provide power for, of all things, interurban trains — trains powered by electricity connecting cities and towns.
But as the internal-combustion engine evolved and Henry Ford started manufacturing automobiles that just about everyone could afford, the need for interurban trains greatly diminished and the electricity being generated at Edwardsport was instead switched over to be used for “illuminating purposes,” lighting homes and businesses.
The plant was built at Edwardsport because of the town’s location, being both next to the West Fork of the White River (which, in earlier days, was the reason the town was settled in the first place) and because of the nearby abundance of relatively easily-mined coal.
Eventually the plant was purchased by Public Service Indiana, which was also buying up many of the little, mom-and-pop owned power companies along with utilities owned by towns. PSI would eventually be purchased by Cinergy, which, in turn, was bought by Charlotte, N.C.-based Duke Energy.
In the late 1950s new generating units were added to bring the Edwardsport plant’s generating capacity up to 130 megawatts, but by the turn of the century the plant was pretty much only being used when it was absolutely necessary due to the high-cost of running it and the relatively little electricity it produced.
Four years ago Duke officials announced plans to shut down the Edwardsport plant down within 10 years, regardless of whether the new plant would be built at the site.
The new plant is expected to go online next fall.
Copyright ©2024 Vincennes Sun Commercial