As many as sixty electrical employees who work at the Armstrong Power Station near Adrian will lose their jobs this fall.
by Jonathan Weaver
Armstrong County is being hit with the closure of yet another industry.
The coal-fire power station’s parent company FirstEnergy Corp. – headquartered in Akron, Ohio – announced yesterday that the station – also referred to as the Reesdale Power Plant – will be one of six retired by this September to comply with federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidelines.
In a news release, FirstEnergy Generation President and Chief Nuclear Officer James Lash elaborated.
“This decision is not in any way a reflection of the fine work done by the employees at the affected plants, but is related to the impact of new environmental rules,” Lash said. “We recently completed a comprehensive review of our coal-fired generating plants and determined that additional investments to implement Mercury and Air Toxic Standards (MATS) and other environmental rules would make these older plants even less likely to be dispatched under market rules. As a result, it was necessary to retire the plants rather than continue operations.”
FirstEnergy Spokesperson Mark Durbin said the employees could be transferred to another facility, could accept retirement if they are 55 years old or older or accept severance pay.
“We will be working with the effected employees to see if there are opportunities at other plants that they could possibly be considered for,” Durbin said. “It’s a tough day for us – you never want to have a situation where employees lose their jobs, but its all revolving around these environmental requirements so it’s something we thought very hard about and, at the end-of-the-day this was the decision we just had to make.”
According to Durbin, the MATS rules were finalized by the EPA in December 2011 and made company officials consider the loss instead of investing more into all facilities.
“It would be quite an expensive proposition, and because these power plants are older, we made the determination it made more sense to not invest in those older plants that don’t really run a lot anyway,” Durbin said. “That’s why we made the decision we did.
“We looked at all of our coal-fire power plants. The larger plants will continue operating,” Durbin said.
Those larger plants include the Bruce Mansfield Power Station in Shippingport, Beaver County – a ‘super-critical’ plant which employs more than 100 people and consumes millions of tons of coal – and the Mitchell Power Station in Courtney, Washington County.
“We are working through a plan where we have already invested a lot of money in those plants, and will have to spend even more dollars since they run more often – it would just make economic-sense to do that compared with some of these smaller plants that just don’t run very much.”
Smoke pours as rail cars bring more coal for the electric power station in Reesedale that is scheduled to be shut down by September 2012.
The Armstrong Power Station has sold power on the electrical grid since 1958.
The local shutdown might slow the economy even more in the coming months, since the Buffalo and Pittsburgh Railroad distributes coal to the power plant via its rail through North Buffalo Township and Applewold Borough.
The railroad is owned by Genesee and Wyoming, Inc., which purchased the rail system in 1988. The rail system operates a 368-mile regional freight railroad throughout western Pennsylvania and western New York.
Members of the Armstrong County Board of Commissioners are concerned by FirstEnergy’s decision.
With the rate of unemployment in Armstrong County hovering around the national average of about 8.5 percent (Armstrong November figures), the loss of 60 jobs, 46 of them union jobs, today’s announcement was not welcome, commissioners said.
In a press release, Board Chairman David Battaglia called the news a ‘huge negative’ for the County.
“Not only are good paying jobs being lost at the Armstrong Power Plant, jobs will certainly be lost in ancillary industries, support services and by small coal mining operations,” Battaglia said. “What impact is this going to have on owner-operator coal truck drivers and fleet operators that deliver the 50 of 60 thousand tons coal to that plant every month? What about the privately owned machine shops that service equipment out there?”
Genesse and Wyoming, Inc. did not issue comment on how the closure would affect the Buffalo and Pittsburgh Railroad and calls were not returned.
Battaglia also wanted to know what effect the closing will have on local coal prices.
Commissioner Rich Fink called the EPA “tone deaf” about what kind of impact the new standards will have on our coal-fired plants and the communities where they operate.
“These coal industry-related federal regulations are killing us in Western Pennsylvania, and especially here in Armstrong County where so much of our economy, including all the spinoff jobs, is tied into our coal and energy resources,” Fink said.
The other five plants closed in the tri-county grid include four from the State of Ohio – including Bay Shore Plant: Units 2-4 in Oregon, the Eastlake Plant in Eastlake, Ashtabula Plant in Ashtabula and the Lake Shore Plant in Cleveland – and one in the state of Maryland, the R. Paul Smith Power Station in Williamsport.
