April 5, 2013

Gas pipeline through Dryden?

There already is one, as residents of Ellis Hollow Creek Road who drive by the E. H. Borger station know. There's also a line off that going to the Cornell heat and power plant. This would be a connection to the Cayuga Power Plant (formerly AES Cayuga, formerly Milliken Station) if it switches from coal to gas:

A proposed natural gas pipeline running through Tompkins County may become part of the uncertain future of Lansing's coal-fired power plant.

The pipeline would be built from the power plant, on the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake, to an existing pipeline in either Dryden or Auburn. The Dryden pipeline is at the Borger Station, 219 Ellis Hollow Creek Road.

The new pipeline is part of a plan that retrofits Cayuga Power Plant, formerly named AES Cayuga, to burn natural gas. The facility's name was changed after AES Eastern Energy went bankrupt and the power plant was bought by Upstate New York Power Producers.

One thing that's odd about this story is that the plant's owners say that there would be problems for electrical reliability in the county if the plant closed. NYSEG performed a major upgrade of its lines across Cortland County and Dryden into the Etna substation a few years ago that I had thought was meant to address just that problem. How did that fail?

The New York State Public Service Commission is requiring that NYSEG either upgrade its infrastructure or that the plant keep running, Goodenough said.

They're also planning on a 2-megawatt solar panel array. The article doesn't say how much power the plant itself generates.

Posted by simon at April 5, 2013 6:37 AM in
Note on photos