New York State's coal-burning era will end Tuesday, when Somerset Operating Co. officially retires its power plant on the shore of Lake Ontario in Niagara County.
It means the share of the state's power generation coming from coal will fall to zero.
"We were the last coal-fired plant in New York State," plant manager Brian Gregson said Monday.
The 675-megawatt plant, opened by New York State Electric & Gas Corp. in 1983, last generated electricity on March 13, when it burned off the last of its coal. The process ended at 12:02 a.m. March 14.
The plant sat idle more than it ran in recent years. It has been at least five years since the plant operated without interruption for as long as a month, Gregson said.
The plant's 613-foot smokestack can be seen from as far away as Buffalo on clear days.
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So could the emissions from the stack, although the plant won awards for emission control before the state imposed new regulations which in effect made it illegal to burn coal to generate electricity.
The business hasn't been healthy for years. In December 2011, AES Eastern Energy, which had bought the plant from NYSEG in May 1999, went bankrupt because it was unable to pay bondholders.
The creditors formed Upstate New York Power Producers and took over the plant. Beowulf Energy of New York formed Somerset Operating Co. and bought the plant in 2016.
“Somerset as we have known it for so many years no longer exists," Gregson said in a company news release. "This is a sad day for all of us here, and the corona pandemic has made it an even more difficult one."
The shutdown means 52 people will lose their jobs.
Gregson said he furloughed 30 hourly employees last week, after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered nonessential workers to be sent home in an effort to quell the Covid-19 pandemic. Most management employees, including Gregson, are working from home.
"Somerset will eventually utilize the existing staff to complete various obligations required to retire the plant in a safe and environmentally responsible manner," the announcement said. "Workforce reductions will occur in phases over the next year."
Plans are in the works for a town park on part of the 1,800-acre Lake Road parcel. A long-term plan, agreed to by NYSEG when it acquired the land in the late 1970s, envisioned a park in the northeast corner of the site.
Somerset Supervisor Jeffrey M. Dewart said state officials are reviewing park plans from the town's engineers. The state has allocated $1.33 million for the project as part of its Lake Ontario Resiliency and Economic Development Initiative.
Meanwhile, Beowulf Energy is seeking state assistance to erect data centers in Somerset and at another mothballed coal-burning plant in Tompkins County.
"We're still making progress. We're still trying to move forward with that," Gregson said. "We're very excited about the possibility of developing the data center."
Last July, the New York Power Authority agreed to sell 10 megawatts of electricity to what Beowulf calls the Empire State Data Hub. At the time, the company said it would need more electricity.
In exchange for the 10 megawatts, Somerset Operating committed to create at least 165 new full-time jobs at the data center and to invest at least $85 million of its own money in the data center. It also suggested a solar power farm with a 70-megawatt capacity.
With the power plant's closing, local governments lose a significant revenue source.
For most of the plant's history, it was the county's largest property taxpayer. At its peak, it paid $19.6 million a year to the county, the Town of Somerset and the Barker Central School District.
However, the plant's tax bill has been steadily reduced since 2006, when the county Industrial Development Agency began to grant PILOTs – payments in lieu of taxes -– which have been renegotiated downward several times.
The last such deal, in 2018, set the power plant's total tax bill at $3 million, but even that was too much for the company, which last year fell behind on its PILOT payments for the first time ever.
Dewart said town attorneys are negotiating a new PILOT for the mothballed plant.