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One response to “Rogue Board”

1. 

   Acbar

   August 21, 2017

   I happen to know something about the Mirant plant in Alexandria and you are quite right, Mirant inherited a complicated reliability situation when it bought that plant from Pepco. That coal plant was built after 1939 to supply power to the [then under construction] Pentagon, because the local power supply in the 30s was inadequate. The grid in the downtown DC and Arlington/Alexandria area has grown since then, of course, but the DC area has transmission constraints that could, as recently as the early 2000s, only be satisfied by running generation inside the Beltway to stabilize things. Pepco retained two old generating plants located on Benning Road and at Buzzard Point for this purpose even as it sold off all its more modern units. Pepco also owned the Alexandria plant, and while it sold those units to Mirant, Mirant was required to run them whenever they were needed for reliability reasons or pay a substantial penalty. In fact, the White House and a large portion of downtown’s office district lost power at one point in a brownout situation that would have been much worse without the Alexandria plant, as I recall. Later, when the contractual penalty had expired and Mirant was free to retire the Alexandria units because of the changing economics of coal, as well as the politics of Alexandria’s cleaning up its North End, the federal government did indeed intervene to keep the units running until major transmission improvements could be completed (by both Pepco and Dominion) in 2007 to eliminate the reliability constraints.

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