![]() Modified four times and the subject of wonky debates on regulatory purview and where it belongs, SB115 revamps much of how the utility company does business. Gary Herbert signed a massive bill involving Rocky Mountain Power on Wednesday, signaling his intent to allow a five-year pilot project to prove its merits or unravel in failure. ![]() Rocky Mountain Power said it will engage with local communities before selecting the final sites for Utah’s future nuclear facilities.SALT LAKE CITY - Utah Gov. ![]() The first phase of closures at the Hunter plant is expected in 2031. This way, we have a big window moving forward of jobs and what jobs can be created.” “It's also going to give us a little bit of closure about what was going to happen because we knew that the fossil fuel plants were going to be closed down. “I think the next 10 years are going to be very exciting for Emery County,” said Castle Dale Mayor Danny Van Wagoner. Other local leaders see the impending closures and transition to nuclear power as a massive opportunity for the region to continue to supply jobs for years to come. “Family and community is very important to us and so it concerns us when there's going to be such a big change.”īy her own estimation, the majority of Ferron’s residents are employed by nearby power plants or coal mines. “We're a small community that's very close and we like to have our kids be able to retain jobs here and stay here in the area,” Justice said. In Emery County, local leaders are cautiously optimistic about the future. Rocky Mountain Power will be releasing a “community action plan” next year and expects to be training employees on new technologies by 2027. “When we've had retirements of existing plants, we do our best to make arrangements for our employees to, if they want to stay with the company, to retrain and redeploy at other facilities in our service area,” Eskelsen said. The company said it doesn’t plan on leaving those employees out in the cold, either. The two coal facilities account for more than 300 jobs. Talk of decommissioning the two coal-fired plants has been ongoing since 2018 as the markets have begun to shift away from fossil fuels, Eskelsen said, but the recent announcement bumps up their expected closures by as much as 10 years in the case of the Hunter plant. “The anticipation is that it would be useful to use the transmission interconnections that currently exist with those plants.” “Those could be at Hunter and Huntington sites,” said Rocky Mountain Power spokesperson David Eskelsen. The company has anticipated the need in the next 10 years for two new nuclear-powered facilities, similar to the delayed project underway in Kemmerer, Wyoming. The Huntington and Hunter coal-fired plants in Emery County have already been identified as possible locations for future nuclear power stations in Rocky Mountain Power’s latest long-term planning document. It’s a future that likely includes nuclear energy. “But I think we're ready to see what the future holds.” “We've had a long relationship with coal mines and power plants, and so change is, obviously, something scary and maybe a little bit intimidating to us,” said Ferron City Mayor Adele Justice. But what happens to the communities that have relied on those plants for jobs? Two of Utah’s coal-fired power plants will close by 2032.
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