LORDSTOWN, Ohio -- “The heavy lifting is done,” says Mayor Arno Hill of an $800 million project that would see a power generation plant built in his village. “We know what we have to do to wrap it up, and there’s not going to be any problems.”
Hill’s optimism comes from months of working with Clean Energy Future Lordstown LLC to find new site for an electricity plant to be fueled by natural gas. In June the village planning commission vetoed rezoning to industrial a 57-acre site at 1107 Salt Springs Road, land first identified by the Boston-area company in April (READ STORY).
The new site is in the Lordstown Industrial Park, on property owned by the Henn family and already zoned industrial. Although the sale has been agreed to -- terms not disclosed -- the transaction has not closed, Hill says.
“There’s nothing to hold up this project now that I can see,” he adds.
In December the project received the go-ahead from PJM Interconnection, a regional transmission organization that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in 13 states, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s website.
“They’re the electric grid traffic cops,” Hill says, “and we had to wait for them to get approval to tie into the grid.”
With that hurdle cleared, Clean Energy Future-Lordstown published a “notice of public informational meeting for proposed major utility facility” Jan. 2 in the Tribune Chronicle. The meeting is scheduled for Jan. 13 from 5 to 7:30 p.m. in the village administration center.
The advertisement describes the project, which would be privately funded, as an “800 megawatt gas fired, combined cycle power station” that will replace “regional electricity capacity” once coal-fired generating stations go offline. “The project will consist of two gas-fired, high efficiency combustion turbines with two heat recovery steam generators and a single steam turbine,” states the notice. “The generating station will be interconnected to the proximate 345 kV transmission corridor (highland-Mansfield; and Highland Sammis circuits), about 0.5 mile from the generating facility.”
Regulatory permits must be obtained for the project to move forward. Clean Energy Future says it hopes to begin construction in the fall with commercial operations beginning in mid-2018. Some 550 construction workers would be employed to build the plant, Hill says, and about 30 full-time workers, sharing an annual payroll of $3.2 million, would operate it,
State and local government incentives must still be agreed to, the mayor notes, but the parameters of the tax abatements the company needs should be no problem, he adds.
“I’ve got a village council I can work with and a school board and superintendent I can work with,” Hill says. “We’re going to get this done.”
The Lordstown public schools, today operating with a deficit, stand to receive “some big cash payments” in the next few years, he continues.
Company officials have said the plant would also generate tax revenues of more than $100 million over the life of the project. The city of Warren and the Mahoning Valley Sanitary District would provide water and wastewater collection services.
Clean Energy Future has helped develop power-generation plants in California, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania as well as a natural-gas-to-electricity plant in Fremont that’s now operated by AMP Ohio.
Copyright 2015 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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