WHITE PINE, MI-- White Pine Electric Power is protesting a plan to shut the plant down in November.
Regional transmission operator MISO has filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to terminate the plant’s System Support Resource services. Upon FERC approval the SSR will be eliminated within 90 days of MISO’s filing.
The Michigan Agency for Energy says the move could save U.P. ratepayers about $7 million a year through June of 2018. The agency supports American Transmission Company’s plan to reconfigure its transmission system and revise its operating guide in the Northwestern U.P. The changes would eliminate the need to run White Pine as an SSR unit.
White Pine officials say the decision reduces electrical reliability in the Western Upper Peninsula and doesn’t take unplanned outages into account. They say the plant also provides backup power when other facilities are down for maintenance.
But the MAE says the White Pine unit itself went down unexpectedly several times last summer. It says the new solution greatly reduces the risk of a catastrophic loss of power in the area, and ATC has the ability to adjust work schedules to protect reliability during planned maintenance outages.
