A Black Hills Corp subsidiary has ordered an 80 MW coal-fired power plant from Babcock and Wilcox (B&W). The contract for the Wygen unit 1, to be constructed near Gillette, Wyoming, is valued at over $100 million. Completion is scheduled for 2003.
The pulverised coal fired power plant will feature a boiler producing 35.5 t/h of superheated steam at 541°C and 11.2 MPa. B&W’s extended scope includes all the auxiliary boiler equipment, the turbine generator, coal and ash handling systems and the plant control system.
Wygen 1 will incorporate extensive emission control systems. These will include a dry scrubbing system for sulphur dioxide removal, selective catalytic reduction for post combustion nitrogen oxide removal and a fabric filter baghouse for particulate removal. The boiler will incorporate low-NOx burners. The new unit is expected to burn around 450 000 t/yr of low sulphur bituminous coal from Black Hills Crops adjacent Wyodak mine. It will be the fourth coal-fired plant at the company’s energy complex near Gillette.
B&W claims that the unit is the only new-capacity pulverized coal fired power station currently under contract in the USA. It hopes the order will signal an upturn for coal in competition with natural gas fired power generation which has proved widely popular in the USA in recent years.
