In January 2003, PacifiCorp filed a long-range forecast with the Utah Public Service Commission that ended with a blunt number. To keep the lights on along the Wasatch Front, the utility said it would need roughly 570 megawatts of new baseload power by the summer of 2007. It did not yet know where that power would come from. It only knew it would need to buy or build it fast.
Across the freeway from Orem, Geneva Steel had shut down for good and its estate was in bankruptcy court selling off the pieces. The mill had been the reason Vineyard existed as a town at all. When the community incorporated in May 1989, the steel works was its tax base. Now the furnaces were cold, and the town had almost nothing else to tax.
Bidding for the Geneva site
PacifiCorp opened the job to competition under a bidding process called RFP 2003-A, watched by an outside evaluator, the consulting firm Navigant. Bids came in. After the economics were run, three serious contenders remained, and two of them proposed the same patch of ground: the Geneva Steel site in Vineyard.
The reason was in the wires. The Geneva site sat close to where people actually used electricity and next to the utility's 345 kV and 138 kV transmission systems. The third finalist, by contrast, depended on a 400 mile transmission line that the utility's consultants judged could not realistically be finished by the summer of 2007.
That left a choice between two plans for the same land. One bidder offered to sell power from a plant it would run, with PacifiCorp supplying the gas. The other, from Summit Vineyard LLC, offered a turnkey deal: Summit would develop the plant, hire Siemens Westinghouse to build it, and hand PacifiCorp the keys when it was done.
PacifiCorp picked the turnkey plan and filed for permission on May 28, 2004. The project, christened Lake Side, was rated at 534 megawatts. About 470 would come from the combined cycle turbines, 45 more from burning extra fuel in the exhaust, and 19 from injecting steam.
A fight over the winner
The choice drew fire from a coalition of big industrial power users. Their witness argued that the losing bid had actually been cheaper and was thrown out over the risk of a delay of two to four months. He worried that credit worries had been used to make sure the utility owned the plant itself. PacifiCorp answered with its own math. Factoring in risk, and a hypothetical carbon charge of $8 a ton, it scored Lake Side as the better value.
In the end the critics took no formal position on the plant itself and waived cross examination. On November 12, 2004, the commission granted the certificate, noting that "no party opposed" building Lake Side.
Water, air and a tax base
Work began in 2005. At a groundbreaking in September, Robert Looper of Summit Vineyard argued that power made close to home mattered because transmission lines into the area were congested. Vineyard's mayor, Randy Farnworth, was thinking about something else. He told reporters the plant would give the town a tax base it had lacked since the steel mill shut down, in a place that had only a few small businesses.
The demand just keeps growing.John Bowater, Lake Side plant manager, 2007
The plant drank from the mill's legacy as well as its land. Geneva's bankruptcy trustee sold most of the mill's water rights to the Central Utah Water Conservancy District for $88.5 million, and some additional rights went to Summit Vineyard for $14 million. To satisfy air rules in a county that federal regulators had found out of compliance with pollution standards since 1992, the plant used emission offset credits purchased from Geneva Steel. Those credits were a prize: in early 2006, the mill held offsets for more than 7,000 tons of pollutants a year, about 86 percent of all the credits in Utah County, and a citizens group led by Orem's Bruce Parker talked about buying them simply to retire them.
By May 2007 the plant was in startup testing. Industry reports put its price at $330 million; the Deseret Morning News reported $350 million. Inside were two Siemens Westinghouse combustion turbines of 170 megawatts each, and a 195 megawatt steam turbine spun by their exhaust heat. Gas arrived on the Kern River and Questar pipelines, and selective catalytic reduction scrubbed nitrogen oxides from the stacks.
That June, plant manager John Bowater showed a reporter around a facility on nearly 70 acres, with the plant itself on 22 acres of former Geneva land and a staff of just 21. "The demand just keeps growing," he said. A company spokesman added that Utah was the fastest-growing part of the utility's six-state territory and used about 42 percent of its power.
Lake Side 2
Bowater was right about demand. In December 2009, PacifiCorp went shopping again, and the winner was another plant on the same ground. On April 20, 2011, after a hearing that March, the commission approved Lake Side 2, a 637 megawatt plant to be built next door by CH2M Hill. The state's utility regulators and consumer advocates both backed it.
There was a sideshow. The Division of Public Utilities argued that PacifiCorp had acted imprudently in walking away from talks to acquire a different plant, known in the record as the Apex project, and wanted customers compensated. The commission declined to decide that question in the Lake Side case, and in June 2011 sent it to a general rate case instead.
Construction followed the 2011 approval on a 63.6 acre site. A January 2014 filing gave the details: two combustion turbines and one steam turbine, 548 megawatts at base load plus 97 from duct firing, for 645 megawatts on an average 52 degree day. Power would leave through a new 345 kV substation the company named Steel Mill. Cooling water would come from the Central Utah Water Conservancy District, purchased in phases through 2019. The dollar figures were blacked out in the public copy.
By then the buildings were finished and the first turbine was due to fire that January, with tuning set for spring and commercial service in June 2014. Two power blocks now stood on former mill ground, their steam plume visible from Interstate 15. Vineyard, meanwhile, was about to stop being a town of a few hundred people.
From vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-power-plant-at-the-mill/
