Six new natural gas units are going up where a colossal coal pile once stood at the Martin Drake Power Plant, a major step toward dismantling the aging blue building in downtown. 

Colorado Springs Utilities started work preparing for the new $120 million units shortly after the power plant burned coal for the last time in September. Crews needed take out coal handling equipment, such as conveyors, and excavate the site that was once black with dust to put in the infrastructure for the new turbines, project supervisors said. 

Now a crane is sliding pieces of the generators into place and they are expected to start producing power in late February or early March, said Travas Deal, chief operations officer. The new turbines can produce up to 167 megawatts of power and while still impressive in size, only cover 3 acres compared to Drake’s 50 acres, said Jessie Marshall, project manager. 

Martin Drake Power Plant burns coal for the last time

The two existing natural-gas generators at Drake are expected to stop producing electricity in September, setting the stage for the decommissioning of the plant, Deal said. Eventually, the new generators will be moved out of downtown, as well, but that will take time because the power grid was built around downtown power generation. 

The new generators will help fill the peak demand for power when the community is at its hottest and everyone is turning on their air conditioning without the long ramp-up time required by a coal plant. It can take a coal plant 18 hours to get started, while the new generators can start in 10 minutes, Deal said.  

The coal generation at Drake was also sitting idle for months at a time, while Utilities was paying for staff, maintenance and other associated costs. So even though coal is cheaper than natural gas right now, it still made sense to shut down the coal generation because of the total cost, he said. 

The new units will run about 4% to 8% of the time, and they could produce power for a profit on the open market, Deal said.

“It’s a great tool in the arsenal,” he said. 

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Utilities expects to join the Southwest Power Pool in August allowing for those sales. 

Utilities is working on this transition as power demand is expected to surge nationally this summer during the air-conditioning season, which could increase the risk for blackouts, many national media outlets have reported.    

However, Deal said Utilities is not at risk for outages, because it has been aggressive with power planning. 

Utilities purchased power a year ago to help bridge the four to five months that the Drake site will be offline as crews transition between the existing natural gas generators and the new ones, and officials said they got the power at a good price. 

After the turbines in the old plant turn for the final time, a significant amount of work lies ahead to dismantle the site.

“The minute we quit generating, I want to get it as safe as possible, as quick as possible,” Deal said.  

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Just the lead and asbestos mitigation could take a year depending on how much contamination is found, Marshall said. 

Utilities also plans to salvage equipment for internal use and then sell as much of the building as possible for scrap to help recover costs, Deal said. 

The shell of the building will be one of the last things to come down. 

Utilities is still selecting a contractor to decommission the site, so it’s unknown how much the project will cost. 

The environmental cleanup of the site will be a separate step and it will need to address contamination such as coal dust and the residue from burning the coal, he said. 

Utilities will need to work with the city on the future of the site, Deal said, and whether it could be sold.