GOING, GOING, GONE

Co-gen plant brought down in controlled demolition

The defunct Mecklenburg Power Station — widely known as the Clarksville co-gen plant — collapsed in a heap of rubble after a demolition company set off explosives Thursday morning.

It took less than two minutes Thursday morning for the shuttered Mecklenburg Power Station near Clarksville to be reduced to rubble.

At approximately 8:01 a.m., demolition experts with Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI), a Maryland-based commercial explosives contractor, hit the switch that set off a sequence of explosions which toppled the boiler building and the smokestack of the 30-year-old power station, which began life as a co-generation plant operated by Duke Energy. It was later sold to Dominion and renamed the Mecklenburg Power Station, before closing in 2018.

When the dust cleared minutes after the explosions, all that was left of the co-gen plant was a mountain of twisted steel and broken concrete.

One of the people watching the demolition from the staging area was Josephine Comas. She said her uncle, Nelson Venable, once owned the land where the co-gen plant was built.

Growing up, she played in the peach and apple orchards and collected nuts from the many pecan trees that dotted the property. They have long since been removed.

Comas recalled sneaking down wooded paths to swim in the lake that touches the eastern edge of the property. She offered no thoughts about what she or other family members who live in the area would like to rise up at the site.

Don Smith, Dominion Energy’s generation project manager overseeing the destruction of the plant, said it will take workers another four to five weeks to remove the debris left over when the building “folded down” following the explosion.

The adjacent switching station and two small silos were left untouched. Smith said the switching station is still used as a collector and distribution station for electricity running through Dominion Energy’s transmission lines. He did not say what function the silos served or how they would be used in the future.

Earnest Greene, a regional project manager for Dominion Energy, said he had no information about how the company will use the 70-acre site moving forward. Asked if the company had discussed the possibility of installing solar panels on the property, Greene replied, “I have not heard any talks about that.”

In addition to the silos and the switching station, the co-gen plant site has a railroad spur to the Buckingham Branch rail line. It does not have a water intake valve which would allow it to draw water from Buggs Island Lake for future use.

According to Clarksville Town Manager Jeff Jones, workers with Dominion Energy removed the intake valve several years ago and thus gave up their water rights at the site. To regain those rights, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would have to approve a withdrawal request. Jones did not speculate on whether such a request would be approved.

Neither Smith nor Greene suggested that Dominion was considering filing any such application.

The 138-megawatt coal-fired co-gen plant, located off Old National Highway, began commercial service in 1992. Smith said the conventional wisdom at the time was that private companies could build power plants more cheaply than utilities. He said Burlington Industries, which needed steam to run its textile plant in Clarksville, arranged for the plant’s construction.

Smith explained that it is called a co-gen plant because it generated both steam and electricity. The steam was delivered to Burlington’s combing plant via pipes running between the two facilities while the electricity was directed to the electric grid.

Dominion purchased the power station from United American Energy Holdings Corp. of New Jersey in 2004. At the time, Dominion Virginia Power had a 25-year power purchase contract for all of the power generated by the facility.

The facility continued to serve around 34,000 Dominion electric customers in Virginia and North Carolina until 2018, when Dominion idled the Clarksville plant along with units at Chesterfield Coal Plant, Possum Point, and Bremo Bluff, and the Bellemeade and Pittsylvania power stations.

Smith, who has worked for Dominion Energy for more than 40 years, said his current job involves overseeing the demolition of these coal plants. They will be removed in a similar fashion over the next year.

Smith said there are no current plans to demolish the Clover plant in Halifax County, which is also a coal plant. He called it “one of the cleanest generating plants” because of the scrubbers and other equipment installed at the site to reduce the amount of carbon emissions.

Dominion had first signaled plans to close the Mecklenburg Power Station in 2015 in a filing with the Virginia State Corporation Commission known as an Integrated Resource Plan. The IRP is an assessment of the future electric needs and a utility’s plan to meet those future needs over a set period; in this case it was over a 15-year window.

In its 2015 IRP, Dominion pledged to increase its reliance on alternative energy sources, such as solar and wind generation. It is in the process of achieving that goal through its ownership of solar facilities such as the Grasshopper photovoltaic plant near Chase City and its plans, with SolUnesco, to construct the 800 Randolph Solar Project in Charlotte County.

Since 2015, the company has also built two natural gas-burning facilities in the area —the 1,400 megawatt combined cycle natural gas plant in Brunswick County, and a 1,600 megawatt combined cycle natural gas plant at the Brunswick/Greensville county line.

 

 

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