CHICAGO — Dominion Resources will shut its Kewaunee nuclear power station in Wisconsin after failing to find a buyer amid low wholesale electricity prices, the first reactor to close in 15 years.
CHICAGO — Dominion Resources will shut its Kewaunee nuclear power station in Wisconsin after failing to find a buyer amid low wholesale electricity prices, the first reactor to close in 15 years.
Dominion plans to stop producing power at the reactor in the second quarter of 2013, about six months before two long- term power contracts expire, the Richmond, Va.-based company said in a statement Monday. Dominion announced in April 2011 that it was seeking a buyer for the 556-megawatt plant, located about 35 miles (56 kilometers) southeast of Green Bay.
“Dominion was not able to move forward with our plan to grow our nuclear fleet in the Midwest to take advantage of economies of scale,” Thomas Farrell, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, said in the statement. “In addition, Kewaunee’s power purchase agreements are ending at a time of projected low wholesale electricity prices in the region.”
Kewaunee would be the first U.S. nuclear station to close since Millstone unit 1 was decommissioned in 1998, the Nuclear Energy Institute said Monday. The plant’s closing underscores the economic divide between deregulated power producers, squeezed by cheap natural gas, and regulated utilities, said Sam Brothwell, utilities analyst for Bloomberg Industries.
“This is a plant that’s in a competitive market and the economics don’t support keeping an existing fully depreciated plant running, much less building a new one,” Brothwell said in a telephone interview.