Intermountain Power Plant is a large

coal-fired power plant A coal-fired power station or coal power plant is a thermal power station which burns coal to generate electricity. Worldwide, there are about 8,500 coal-fired power stations totaling over 2,000 gigawatts capacity. They generate about a th ...

Delta, Utah Delta is the largest city in Millard County, Utah, United States. It is located in the northeastern area of Millard County along the Sevier River and is surrounded by farmland. The population was 3,436 at the 2010 census. History Delta was ori ...

, US. It has an installed capacity of 1,900 MW, is owned by the

Intermountain Power Agency The Intermountain Power Agency, located in Utah, is a power generating cooperative of 23 municipalities in Utah and 6 in California. It owns the Intermountain Power Plant near Delta, Utah, one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the Unit ...

, and is operated by the

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is the largest municipal utility in the United States with 8,100 megawatts of electric generating capacity (2021-2022) and delivering an average of 435 million gallons of water per day to more ...

. The plant includes a

HVDC A high-voltage direct current (HVDC) electric power transmission system (also called a power superhighway or an electrical superhighway) uses direct current (DC) for electric power transmission, in contrast with the more common alternating curren ...

converter. It is scheduled in 2025 for replacement with an 840 MW natural gas plant, designed to also burn "

green hydrogen Green hydrogen (GH2 or GH2) is hydrogen generated by renewable energy or from low-carbon power. Green hydrogen has significantly lower carbon emissions than grey hydrogen, which is produced by steam reforming of natural gas, which makes up the b ...

Description

The power plant consists of two units each with a generation capacity of 950 MW. Generating units are equipped with

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable energ ...

tandem compound

steam turbine A steam turbine is a machine that extracts thermal energy from pressurized steam and uses it to do mechanical work on a rotating output shaft. Its modern manifestation was invented by Charles Parsons in 1884. Fabrication of a modern steam turbin ...

s and

Babcock & Wilcox Babcock & Wilcox is an American renewable, environmental and thermal energy technologies and service provider that is active and has operations in many international markets across the globe with its headquarters in Akron, Ohio, USA. Historicall ...

subcritical boilers. The boiler houses of Intermountain Power Plant are and the

flue gas stack A flue-gas stack, also known as a smoke stack, chimney stack or simply as a stack, is a type of chimney, a vertical pipe, channel or similar structure through which combustion product gases called flue gases are exhausted to the outside air. Flue g ...

is tall. The HVDC Intermountain

transmission line In electrical engineering, a transmission line is a specialized cable or other structure designed to conduct electromagnetic waves in a contained manner. The term applies when the conductors are long enough that the wave nature of the transmis ...

runs between Intermountain Power Plant and Adelanto Converter Station in

Adelanto, California Adelanto (Spanish for "Advance") is a city in San Bernardino County, California, United States. It is approximately northwest of Victorville in the Victor Valley area of the Mojave Desert, in the northern region of the Inland Empire.Linthicum ...

History

Construction on the plant began in September 1981. Commercial operation of unit 1 started in June 1986, and unit 2 in May 1987. The project cost US$4.5 billion. The plant was originally designed for four units; however, only two units were built. In 2004, units 1 and 2 were uprated. These works were conducted by GE and

Alstom Alstom SA is a French multinational rolling stock manufacturer operating worldwide in rail transport markets, active in the fields of passenger transportation, signalling, and locomotives, with products including the AGV, TGV, Eurostar, Avelia ...

. The Intermountain Power Agency planned to build the third unit of 900 MW capacity. This unit was expected to go online in 2012; however, the project was cancelled after its major purchaser, the city of

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

, decided to become coal-free by 2020. On December 28, 2011, one of the generators failed causing the shut-down of one unit for several months.

Natural gas and green hydrogen plant plans

By 2025 the plant is scheduled to be replaced with an 840 MW natural gas plant, at a cost of $865 million, which utility managers state is necessary both to avoid blackouts which could result from the non- dispatchable nature of solar and wind generation, and to ensure operation of the

Path 27 Path 27, also called the Intermountain or the Southern Transmission System (STS), is a high-voltage direct current (HVDC) electrical transmission line running from the coal-fired Intermountain Power Plant near Delta, Utah to the Adelanto Conver ...

HVDC transmission line which brings solar and wind power from Utah to Los Angeles. The new natural gas fired turbines would be the first of their kind capable of burning a mix of 70% natural gas and 30% "green" hydrogen (hydrogen released by the

electrolysis of water Electrolysis of water, also known as electrochemical water splitting, is the process of using electricity to decompose water into oxygen and hydrogen gas by electrolysis. Hydrogen gas released in this way can be used as hydrogen fuel, or remi ...

, using renewably generated electricity) when the plant opens in 2025. The plan is to steadily increase the hydrogen percentage to 100% by 2045, which will require upgrading or replacement of the turbines to be able to handle greater percentages of hydrogen. The project was granted a $504 million DOE loan in 2022. One expert noted in 2019 that using hydrogen to replace natural gas in power-plant turbines was theoretical and had never been done in practice, and a LADWP IPP official stated that the "economics remain to be seen" and "could be quite expensive." The first major (500MW) hydrogen burning power plant in the US was expected to begin burning 5% hydrogen in Ohio in November 2021, and to migrate to 100% hydrogen over the next decade.

Gallery

IntermountainPowerProjectByPhilKonstantin

References

{{Reflist Coal-fired power stations in Utah Buildings and structures in Millard County, Utah Energy infrastructure completed in 1986 Converter stations 1986 establishments in Utah