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Cardinal Power Plant
Cardinal Power Plant is a 1.8-gigawatt (1,800 MW) coal power plant located south of Brilliant, Ohio, in Jefferson County, Ohio. The power plant has three units. Cardinal is co-owned with Unit 1 owned by American Electric Power's (AEP) subsidiary, AEP Generation Resources. Units 2–3 are owned by Buckeye Power, a utility cooperative. It began operations in 1967. HistoryConstruction of Cardinal started in November 1963. The project was a joint venture of Ohio Power (a forerunner of AEP) and Buckeye Power. Buckeye Power obtained loans from the Rural Electric Administration and financing through Kuhn, Loeb & Co. and the Ohio Company.[1] Cardinal was built adjacent to Ohio Power's Tidd Plant. The plant is named after the State Bird of Ohio, the cardinal.[2] Units 1 and 2 began commercial generation in 1967 at a cost of $131 million.[3] Unit 3 began generation in 1977 after six years of construction at a cost of $220 million.[4][5] In 2017, AEP and Buckeye Power reached an agreement for Buckeye Power to operate all three units at Cardinal.[6] Environmental mitigationTo further reduce nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, AEP and Buckeye Power announced in 2001 they would install selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems to complement their LO-NOx burners at Cardinal. The SCRs would decrease NOx emissions at the plant from 30% to 90%.[7] Between 2005 and 2010, flue-gas desulfurization (FGD) equipment were installed to all three units at Cardinal with Units 1 and 2 costing $300 million to construct. The FGD equipment would reduce sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions by 98%.[8] A year after it was installed, inspectors found severe corrosion in its tank vessel. AEP negotiated a settlement with Black & Veatch, the contractor who installed the FGD equipment, to address the corrosion.[9] Instead of constructing a new chimney for Unit 3's FGD system, AEP retrofitted a cooling tower to release waste heat into the atmosphere.[10] AEP announced in 2015 that its Cardinal unit will be converted into a natural gas power plant by 2030 in order to comply with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards.[11] The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) approved of the conversion.[12] IncidentsDuring construction in June 1965, three workers were killed when a pump casing fell into a well.[13] An explosion killed one worker and injured four in June 1984.[14] See alsoReferences
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