SRP fired up over natural-gas plan

A new $500 million natural-gas-burning power plant in Coolidge fired up for the first time this week, providing "peaking" electricity to Salt River Project when needed. The Coolidge Generating Station was built and is owned by Calgary, Alberta-based TransCanada Corp. SRP has a 20-year contract to dispatch the plant as needed for power on hot summer afternoons, cold winter mornings, or to balance out the power on its system when wind and solar power plants succumb to the whims of nature. "When we went out to look for this particular facility, we really had two purposes in mind," said John Coggins, manager of resource planning and development for SRP. "One was peak capacity needs over the summer months or over peak winter mornings. Secondly, we needed a new resource that could respond well to the intermittency of renewables we are bringing on the system." The plant went live Sunday and was sending power to the grid briefly on Monday. The plant is only expected to run about 10 percent of the year, if that, and even less for the first few years of operation because SRP has much less electricity demand than forecast when the plant was planned, Coggins said. Demand dropped off so much during the recession that SRP has put on hold three other power plants planned southeast of Phoenix.

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