-May 6,2019-
From ENR
The cooling towers of the former Brayton coal plant were imploded on April 26.
Photo courtesy of Commercial Development Company.
A remnant of New England’s coal-fired past came crashing down on April 27, when two, 500 ft cooling towers were demolished in Somerset, Mass. It took 10 seconds and cost $1 million to reduce to rubble the towers that cost $600 million and took four years to build.
It will take another three months to crush the rubble left from the towers and spread it across the 308-acre lot where it will be used as the base for the repurposed site.
The 1,530-MW Brayton Point plant, commissioned in 1963, was the largest coal-fired plant in New England and the last coal plant in Massachusetts.
At one point, coal fueled about 25% of Massachusetts’ electric power but fell to about 6% by 2016.
After New England’s electricity market was deregulated in the 1990s, Brayton Point faced an increasingly tough economic environment in New England’s competitive wholesale power market, and the plant became a liability for a succession of owners, passing in 2005 from an affiliate of California utility Pacific Gas and Electric to Dominion Energy of Richmond, Va., which spent billions of dollars adding environmental controls before selling Brayton to private equity firm Energy Capital Partners in 2013.
In 2015, Energy Capital Partners included Brayton Point in a $3.3 billion bundle of generating assets it sold to merchant generator Dynegy, which ran Brayton for two years before shutting it down. Dynegy sold Brayton Point to Commercial Development Co. (CDC) of St. Louis, Mo., for an undisclosed sum. A press report put the price at $8.5 million, citing local deed and tax records, a figure CDC declined to confirm.
“Brayton Point seems like just one more tombstone in a graveyard of old power plants brought down by various factors, not the least of which are lower power prices driven by falling natural gas prices, low to – in some cases – negative demand growth, and increasing renewable energy adoption,” analyst Paul Patterson with Glenrock Associates, says.
CDC is now turning the site into the Brayton Point Commerce Center, which it calls “a world class logistics port, manufacturing hub, and support center” for the offshore wind sector. “It is a milestone in the region’s transition from coal to renewable energy,” CDC spokesman John Kowalik says.
Brayton Point Commerce Center, CDC’s subsidiary for the new venture, has yet to sign an agreement with a new tenant but is in negotiations with several companies, Stephen Collins, executive vice president of CDC, says.