Frontlines

Battle of Dunkirk

 

 

Utilities rush to save their last tenuous hold over the power plants they so smugly sold off.

Last year, when Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. sold off its 600-megawatt, coal-fired Dunkirk generating station, hard on the Lake Erie shore in southwestern New York state, it probably figured that, at the very least, it could still profit by selling electricity at retail to the new plant owners. To operate the plant, the owners would need power from outside the station for a host of perfunctory applications, such as heating, lighting, and air conditioning of plant control rooms and offices, fuel handling, pumping and treating of cooling water, emissions control and related monitoring equipment, and, of course, starting up the plant following any planned or unplanned shutdown.

Like the father of the bride, Ni-Mo wouldn't lose an asset. It would gain a customer. It would marry itself to the needs of the new owners. Yet some weddings don't go as planned. In this case, the new owners had different ideas.