GRAND HAVEN, MI – The boilers at Grand Haven’s Sims power plant will be turned off a final time this week, marking the final end of the 37-year-old coal-burning facility.

The decision to shut down the plant was made nearly two years ago, but the city had been planning for its demise since before then, said David Walters, general manager of the Grand Haven Board of Light & Power.

The city will now get its electricity from other power providers – just as it already has been doing during spring and fall months for about the last five years, Walters said. Rates are expected to remain the same for customers, he said.

“Our customers, when we shut down Sims, they won’t even see any difference at all,” Walters said.

The J.B. Sims No. 3 power unit was opened in 1983, and a couple years later, its No. 1 and No. 2 units were shut down.

All three will be demolished starting this June, a process expected to last through summer 2021, Walters said. Bierlein Construction of Midland, which is finishing up the removal of the B.C. Cobb Plant in Muskegon, was awarded a $5 million Sims demolition contract, he said.

The board had recorded the official closure date of the Sims plant as June 1, knowing that the date would be closer to mid-February considering the amount of coal it had left to burn, Walters said. That inventory had dwindled to the point where on Tuesday, Feb. 11, Walters said the plant was “coming to a conclusion in the next day or so.”

The outside of the J.B. Sims Generating Station in Grand Haven, Michigan on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2020. The coal-fired power plant, built in 1983, is in the final days of operation and will be torn down beginning this summer.Alison Zywicki | azywicki@mlive.com

While the coal plant can meet current environmental standards, it doesn’t fit with the push to reduce greenhouse gases to combat climate change, Walters said. It also needs about $35 million in improvements to remain operational, and it still would be an expensive plant to operate, he said.

“There was no justification at all to invest that kind of money,” he said. “The economics are not there.”

The relative expense of operating the plant was the reason that it operated only during summers and winters for the last several years, he said. It also had to be shut down at other times because of its unreliability, he said.

When the No. 3 unit was built, it was connected to an outside grid to allow for the purchase of supplemental power on the open marketplace. The city has purchased and will continue to purchase electricity through the Michigan Public Power Agency, comprised of 22 municipalities that have had their own power plants, Walters said.

The site on Harbor Island where the Sims plant is located will continue to house the substation serving Grand Haven’s downtown. An office-type structure will be built to house a control room for the utility grid since the current one is in the plant that will be torn down, Walters said.

The city will install new gas hot water heaters in an existing building on site that will heat the snowmelt system on the downtown sidewalks, he said. A boiler inside the No. 3 plant currently provides most of the heat for the sidewalks.

Under consideration is the addition of natural gas boilers to provide backup power for the downtown, Walters said. They would generate less than 25 megawatts of electricity – a fraction of the 76 megawatts the Sims power system generates, he said. The No. 3 unit produces 70 megawatts and an older diesel engine located in a plant on Harbor Drive produce 6 megawatts, primarily for backup or for sale on the open market, he said.

The rarely-used diesel engine will go offline by June 1, he said.

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