Serving Lucas, Ottawa, Sandusky and Wood Counties
The Press has learned that Competitive Power Ventures, based out of Silver Springs, Md., is in the second stage of a process to build a second natural gas power plant in the city of Oregon.
While the company has not gone public in its endeavor and Oregon city administrator Joel Mazur would not confirm who the company is, the Ohio Power Siting Board announced in November 2023 that it had granted an 18-month extension on initial project plans to the site’s previous owner, Clean Energy Future-Oregon, due to supply chain delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the transition of the facility to a new owner, CPV Oregon Holdings, LLC, an affiliate of Competitive Power Ventures.
Then, on Feb. 9, 2024 – per the Ohio Public Utilities Commission website - the attorney for CPV Oregon Holdings, Dylan F. Borchers of Bricker Graydon LLP, provided official notice to Tanowa Troupe of the Ohio Power Siting Board that 100 percent ownership had been transferred on Jan. 19, 2024.
Clean Energy Future-Oregon had originally planned to construct a natural gas-fired, 955 megawatt combined-cycle electric generation facility.
However, The Press has discovered that a new natural gas site is currently going through the engineering approval process for a 1,475 megawatt natural gas facility. The now 50-acre site is located between North Wynn and North Lallendorf and north of Parkway Road, directly adjacent to the new data center being built.
If all goes right in the approximately 18-month approval process, ground could be broken by mid-2027 with an anticipated opening by 2031.
While he wouldn’t disclose the company, Mazur was able to discuss some details of the project in an exclusive interview with The Press. Although he has been in his role as city administrator in Oregon since October 2022, he said this is a project that has been discussed even before his arrival, approximately the past seven to eight years.
Mazur said he has a “high level of confidence” that the project will be fully approved and that this will become a reality.
“All indicators point to that this is a great location, that this should go through,” he said. “They already have the zoning they need. They already have the land ownership, and they have the availability of the resources to make this project work.”
RELIABILITY RESOURCE INITIATIVE (RRI)
After the transferring of ownership, the new project’s arrival and further development stems from the Reliability Resource Initiative, which is under the umbrella of PJM, or Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland.
PJM is a regional transmission organization (RTO) that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia. It is the largest power grid in America, and they call themselves the air traffic controllers of the power grid as they monitor and coordinate more than 1,400 generating resources and 88,333 miles of high-voltage transmission lines.
Within PJM’s oversight is 15 zones, and Oregon’s zone is controlled by American Transmission Systems (ATSI), which is a subsidiary of First Energy.
The RRI is defined as a “one-time opportunity for shovel-ready resources that have short lead times to construction and operation and can most effectively contribute to reliability.”
Of 94 project applications that were submitted through the RRI, 51 were approved according to a May news release from PJM, which includes 39 uprates – or upgrades - and 12 new construction proposals.
The new Oregon project, which is among those 12 new proposals selected for the process, will produce the largest amount of megawatt energy and joins Carroll County as one of only two new construction sites in Ohio.
MORE BASE LOAD NEEDED
Seven of the new construction sites are in Virginia, where there is a major hub for data centers. Things like data centers, as well as industry – manufacturing primarily – have helped lead to the push regionally for more base load energy production, according to Mazur.
Base load can be defined as consistent energy production categorized through things like nuclear plants, coal plants or anything that generates electricity constantly.
“The Reliability Resource Initiative was a mechanism for PJM to fast track the review of additional projects because they needed more base load,” Mazur said. “They’re addressing near-term electricity demand growth. I would say data centers are a big driver of that, but also industry, more production in industry.
“As manufacturing grows in the United States, that electric demand goes up because industry consumes large amounts of electricity. Your household appliances, like your refrigerator and your air conditioner, consume a large portion of electricity for a household and we have several thousand of them in Oregon, but one large manufacturing plant could consume the equivalent of electric usage in thousands of houses.”
PREVENTING ENERGY SHORTFALLS
Last month, the Columbus Dispatch reported that Ohio could face energy shortfalls by 2027 if the PJM grid isn’t upgraded as increased demand from data centers and other sources are contributing to the potential strain on Ohio’s power grid.
Projects like the RRI and what it is birthing in terms of new energy plants can help solve those potential issues in the future.
Mazur said energy shortfall is a big concern in the region, but he said it also presents an opportunity to shine the spotlight on places like Oregon when thinking about this region.
“I definitely think it helps regionally,” Mazur said. “It's not like all energy produced in Oregon is consumed in Oregon. That's certainly not the case. Regionally, I think it transcends beyond our borders. Figuratively speaking, it makes Oregon a powerhouse. Certainly, being so immersed in the energy industry is not Oregon's only identity, but it definitely is part of the identity here. It's a very big part of the identity here.”
INFRASTRUCTURE IN PLACE
With the energy foundation in Oregon’s past and present, including the retired Acme power station originally built in East Toledo in 1918, the Bay Shore Power Plant, the Toledo Refining Company, Cenovus Energy and the Alpont methanol plant, the new natural gas facility could join the Oregon Clean Energy Center as one of two producers in the area.
Mazur thinks Oregon is the perfect place for the new plant because of that infrastructure.
“The opportunity here is that there's availability to natural gas because there's an abundance of it,” he said. “There's availability of natural gas due to the access to the pipelines. We have the trifecta - the abundance of natural gas, the access to the pipelines, and the access to the grid from the location in Oregon - because of the transmission infrastructure that we have in place already.
“The city of Oregon becomes a very attractive location for not just energy producers, but data centers, too, because they realize that a lot of energy is produced here.”
Mazur said he believes Oregon is the “energy capital of the Midwest.”
“We have two refineries, two power plants, and possibly a third power plant, (and) a methanol plant,” he said. “That is a lot of energy produced here in a lot of different ways. If you look at the refineries and what they produce, that's energy fuel consumption for everything that they make, from gasoline to diesel to jet fuel and everything else. Plus, you have the electric generating plants, and then you have a methanol plant. Per capita, we produce more energy than most other places in the country.”
Mazur said the addition of the Nexus pipeline, an industry shift away from coal burning, and hydraulic fracking in Pennsylvania and Southeast Ohio, there’s an abundance of natural gas in the PJM region.
“A big driver for new energy production is built around natural gas power plants,” Mazur said. “Over the last 15 or 20 years, we've seen an increase in our region of natural gas power plant construction. That's in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other places. And Oregon has already seen that once already with the Oregon Clean Energy plant.”
IMPACT ON THE AREA
Mazur said the plant will help generate short-term income tax and long-term property tax value increases.
“If you look at the structure of the first Oregon Clean Energy One plant, it's job creation (for the city),” he said. “So we do generate income tax. In the short term, during construction, what we see is a very high increase in payroll income tax because of the amount of workers it takes to build one of these. This will take three and a half years to build. During that time, we would expect to see a very large increase in payroll income tax from the workers that are here.
“Long-term, there's not a lot of workers there but the property tax value increases dramatically so it does help the city in a small way, and not just the payroll tax, but also in the little bit that the city receives in property taxes. The schools are obviously big beneficiaries of property taxes, so it helps the community in that it helps provide long-term financial stability for the school system.”
WATER RUNOFF, NOISE READINGS
Mazur said one of the things that the city is involved with in this project is devising a plan to manage stormwater runoff and providing utilities for a plant this size, and he said part of that includes a separate water line from the city of Toledo.
“We don't have enough availability of water from our water treatment plant to provide them,” he said. “There's a separate water line that's actually designed coming from the city of Toledo that at least in the short term they would be able to tap into.
“If we were ever to expand our water plant, then we would be able to supply them water. Right now for a plant this size, we just don't have the capacity at our water treatment plant to provide them with water, which is actually a good thing for the city of Oregon. Because if we have a water line coming in from the city of Toledo, it gives us, the city of Oregon, a redundant water source in case of an emergency.
“If anything ever happened with our water treatment plant or our intake or something like that, we would have a mechanism in place where we could still provide water to our city via this redundant connection from Toledo.”
Additionally, the engineers installed noise monitors around the site last week.
“They’re monitoring the noise prior to the build-out of the facility, and they're taking the noise readings over about a week-long period,” Mazur said. “They're just taking background noise of the area around the site. They’ll be up for about a week and then taken down.”
Stay tuned to The Press for the latest on this project as it develops, and the most up-to-date information can be found at PressPublications.com.
