The years of Zimmer Power Plant was going to remain open were already numbered, but a new announcement signals it's time to start counting the days it will remain open instead.
Vistra will shut down its Zimmer Power Plant in the Village of Moscow, Ohio, by May 31, 2022, according to a company release.
The electricity-generating station in Clermont County was previously scheduled to be retired no later than in 2027 based on environmental regulations. About 150 people are employed at the plant, according to Vistra. Opened in 1991, the plant has a capacity of 1,300 megawatts.
The company said the decision to close came after the plaint failed to secure any capacity revenues in the latest auction held in May by the grid operator, PJM.
In return for a commitment to provide power on demand, PJM pays power plants for that capacity as part of a market reliability pricing model, according to the PJM website.
Zimmer was unable to sell any generating capacity in the 2022-2023 auction as it was at priced about 50 percent lower than the previous year, according to Vistra's release.
Bidding lower could have resulted in multimillion-dollar losses, according to the release.
"The Zimmer coal-fueled power plant has recently struggled economically due to its configuration, costs, and performance," said Curt Morgan, chief executive officer of Vistra. "The PJM capacity revenues are critical to Zimmer, and unfortunately, without them, the plant simply doesn't make money."
Morgan said the decision to close was not easy.
"Our people work hard every single day to provide power to Ohioans and have done a number of things over the past few years to sustain the life of the plant and improve its economics," he said in the release. "But despite their best efforts, the disappointing auction results, along with other challenging factors, make continued economic operation impossible. We're left with a difficult but necessary decision of retiring the plant."
The Zimmer site will be evaluated for potential investments in renewables or grid-scale battery storage, according to the release.
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