Construction on coal-fired power plant passes halfway point

ST. PAUL, Va. – The steel structure is almost complete for the 20-story boiler building at the Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center, the 585-megawatt coal-fired power plant under construction and on target to be operational in 2012.

With the ongoing clank and clatter of equipment audible across the surrounding, hilly landscape, the project is “well past halfway” complete, said Greg Edwards, the plant site spokesman for Dominion Virginia Power, which is building the center.

“They’ll start enclosing the building before too long,” Edwards said, adding that much of the work expected in the coming year will be invisible to the public because it

will be inside the building.

Even so, these days the signs of construction can be seen for miles, as vast tracts of land, visible from Alternate U.S. Highway 58, are being used as storage for pieces and parts of the plant as it’s built.
More than 1,300 workers are on the site, Edwards said, and about 30 percent of them are local to Wise and Russell counties.

“We’re in a recession, the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression, and it’s good that we’re able to provide several hundred construction jobs here at Virginia City at a time when jobs are much harder to find than they were a couple of years ago,” Edwards said.

On the power plant site, a lot has happened since this time last year, when concrete was being poured for the first structure, the plant’s 500-foot chimney. It was completed and topped with an evergreen tree just in time for Christmas.

In just less than a year, the major buildings of the $1.8 billion power plant have taken shape, an unmistakable sight from the air and the surrounding hillsides.

Three ash silos also have been put up, each about 130 feet high. And the power plant’s four-story administration building is almost under roof.

Boiler parts are stacked along a road at the site in trailer-sized containers as the massive structures are assembled.

Work also continues at Curley Hollow, which Edwards said will hold all of the ash the plant generates over the next 30 years.

Edwards also said the power company should hear “any time now” about whether the U.S.

Department of Energy will help fund a $600 million proposal to fit the plant with carbon capture and storage technology – to keep the carbon dioxide in plant emissions from reaching the atmosphere.

“It would be good for the area,” Edwards said of the project, which also would add another large structure to the power plant site. “It would be good to prove some of the carbon capture technologies that are going to be important to the coal-fired electricity industry.”

In addition to the large-scale demonstration project planned on the site, he said, Dominion is committed to installing carbon capture technology at the plant when it becomes commercially available.

The power company also has at least one other electricity generation project in the works for Wise County; data is being collected for the construction of a wind farm along Black Mountain.

Delegate Bud Phillips, D-Sandy Ridge, said at a legislative forum Monday that the possibility of a natural gas-fired power plant also is being reviewed. Dominion officials did not immediately confirm plans for such a project.

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