CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (AP) — The Tennessee Valley Authority has shut down a hydroelectric power plant on Raccoon Mountain after cracks were found in rotors.
The $310 million plant near Chattanooga has provided hydroelectric power for 34 years, but was taken out of service in March. Utility officials called it a design flaw that led to cracks in all four generators.
The utility had not announced the shutdown until last week when TVA President and CEO Tom Kilgore told financial analysts that it was bringing back two idled coal plants this summer to make up for the loss of peak-power generation from Raccoon Mountain.
TVA Vice President John McCormick told the Chattanooga Time Free Press (http://bit.ly/Ql0ad2 ) the utility hopes one of the four generators can be repaired within two years, although he would not make an estimate on the repair cost.
"But it will absolutely not cost more than the original plant," he said.
The other three generators are not salvageable even for temporary use, he said.
"We have 900,000 pounds of scrap at this point," McCormick said Thursday.
The German firm that designed the units told TVA to look for cracks after rotors in a similar plant in Austria splintered. Two other plants in Virginia and California are facing similar repairs.
McCormick said although the generators have been running fine with the cracks, TVA chose the safer route to shut down the plant completely.
"If my brake light came on, I would take my car to the repair shop even though it's an inconvenience," McCormick said.
The plant has a reservoir atop the mountain that has 528 acres of water surface that also serves as state-designated wildlife observation area. The dam at Raccoon Mountain's upper reservoir is 230 feet high and 8,500 feet long and is the largest rockfill dam ever built by TVA.
The generators pull water from the river and pump it up through a concrete tunnel through the middle of the mountain to fill the reservoir.
Then the water flows back down through those generators to make power and return back to the Tennessee River Gorge. Hydropower is extremely cheap to produce and the plant was being used nearly every day by the TVA.
The plant provided an average of 1,652 megawatts of electricity a day, enough to power nearly a million homes.
McCormick said that the timing of the plant's shutdown is a silver lining in this cloud, because of the current low cost of gas allows TVA's new gas-fired plants to balance the price of buying power from other utilities or generate additional power to meet the peak demands normally handled by Raccoon Mountain.
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