Kautz remembered when the power plant was just about the only business in Burnsville, so it has a special meaning for the city. By next week, the plant will have burned through all of it. Its 125 cars would offload 12,500 tons of coal. Headlights flashing, the blue-and-white locomotive crossed a bridge over Black Dog Lake and stopped at the entrance to the dumper building. Still, what happened at Black Dog is one more step toward a more sustainable energy future.īurnsville Mayor Elizabeth Kautz also showed up Wednesday to watch the last train roll in to the power plant. Although natural gas burns much cleaner, it also produces carbon pollution. Xcel estimates the coal “decommissioning” will wrap up in 2021.īlack Dog is small enough that the strip mines of Wyoming will barely notice the lost customer. The state has already approved a plan to cap the coal ash ponds, said Brian Behm, the plant director. While two units were converted to natural gas in 2002, Black Dog’s units 3 and 4 will keep running on coal up to the federal deadline, but the mountain of coal behind the plant has dwindled to nothing. Nationwide, the emission reductions from that rule are expected to have enormous health benefits, including from 4,200 to 11,000 fewer premature deaths, according to the U.S. The fine soot particles from coal combustion can cause heart attacks.Ī federal regulation on mercury and air toxics ultimately spelled the end of coal at Black Dog, which produced 73 pounds of mercury pollution in 2011, said Anne Jackson, principal engineer in the air policy unit of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Wastewater lagoons where coal ash is dumped can spill into rivers. Our dependence on coal has environmental implications all along the chain, from mountaintop destruction and deadly mine disasters to mercury contamination of fish, acid rain and greenhouse gases that heat up the planet. But its enormous smokestack lacks any scrubbers, meaning there’s no filter for the toxic by-products of coal combustion. The trains arrived once or twice each week, hopper cars brimming with low-sulfur coal scraped from the prairies of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.īlack Dog’s coal units provide enough electricity for 200,000 homes. They were replaced in the 1980s by rail cars. At that time, the coal arrived by barges traveling up the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers. After all, the Black Dog plant has burned coal since the 1950s. Some of the Xcel execs admitted feeling a bit sentimental about the change. “We do see a transition away from coal,” he said. Chris Clark, president of Xcel’s Minnesota operations, talked about his company’s plan to get 63 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2030. On Wednesday, the last coal train screeched into the plant, greeted by news cameras and Xcel Energy executives. Coal-burning generators in Hoyt Lakes and Schroeder, Minn., will also shut down within the next month. The muzzling of the Black Dog plant is a small but significant step away from the dirtiest energy source and a key factor in climate change. Black Dog will complete its conversion to cleaner-burning natural gas, ahead of a federal order to clean up its operations or shut down. Next week, the big stack will stop exhaling, once the final stockpile of coal is burned. Black Dog pumped out 1.9 million tons of carbon dioxide last year, making it Minnesota’s fourth-largest carbon polluter among power plants last year, according to state data. What comes out of that stack is nearly invisible, but it’s potent. It’s a Burnsville landmark and a monument to a half-century of electricity generated by burning millions of tons of coal. At 680 feet tall, the concrete smokestack of Xcel Energy’s Black Dog power plant towers over the Minnesota River bottomlands.
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