Portland General Electric permanently closes Boardman coal-fired plant
Portland General Electric (PGE) has permanently closed its Boardman Generating Station in Eastern Oregon’s Morrow County.
The closure stems from an agreement PGE reached with stakeholders, customer groups, and regulators in 2010 to end operations at Boardman 20 years ahead of schedule and transitioning to cleaner energy resources. Boardman was the only coal-fired power plant in Oregon.
“Our customers are counting on us to deliver a clean energy future,” PGE President and CEO Maria Pope said. “PGE’s Boardman closure is a major step on our path to meeting Oregon’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals and transforming our system to reliably serve our customers with a cleaner, more sustainable energy mix.”
Boardman’s closure has been factored into PGE’s plans since 2010, so the company has enough electricity to continue reliable electric service to customers after the plant’s shutdown. No single generator will replace Boardman. Rather the void will be filled by a mix of resources, including five-year contracts with the Bonneville Power Administration, Washington’s Douglas County PUD, and other independent suppliers. Further, a request for additional long-term proposals, non-emitting capacity resources, is in the planning stages and is expected to be conducted next year.
The company also plans to incorporate energy storage, new renewable resources, and new distributed resources like demand response to create a cleaner, more resilient power system for the future.
One of them is Wheatridge – a facility PGE is building with NextEra Energy Resources just south and east of Boardman, with 300 megawatts of wind and 50 megawatts of solar, augmented by 30 megawatts of battery storage. The Wheatridge wind farm is in the final stages of construction and will be online this year. The solar and storage resources will be built in 2021 and will be running by the end of 2021.
Some Boardman employees will continue working through 2021 to conduct environmental cleanup and ready the facility for demolition and removal in 2022. Others will retire, leave the company, or move to other positions with PGE. The company provided a comprehensive retention and severance plan as well as education and job-training benefits for employees.
Portland General Electric serves 901,000 customers in the Portland area.
