News Releases

Harrington Station at 30 - Still on the Cutting Edge

AMARILLO, TEXAS - Thirty years have passed since Xcel Energy first opened its state-of-the-art Harrington Generating Station, and it’s obvious the world has changed since 1976.

A whole generation has grown up without an 8-track player. Disco is dead. And many who sported fashionably long hair simply long for any hair at all.

But the past, however, has a tendency to revisit the present with familiar issues. Americans are once again struggling with high fuel costs both at home and on the road, we’re still seeking out ways to protect our environment, and Bob Dylan is still at the top of the Billboard charts.

And while Harrington Station was planned and built by men and women from a different generation in a different age, it still stands on the cutting edge of electric generation technology and environmental protection while providing low-cost energy for a growing region.

Today, employees and retirees of Xcel Energy and Southwestern Public Service Company (SPS) will gather to celebrate 30 years of “Power for the Plains” at a celebration luncheon on the plant grounds. Many of those responsible for the construction of the plant will be on hand, including former plant director and retired Xcel Energy executive Henry Hamilton. Joining Hamilton will be David Wilks, president of Xcel Energy’s Energy Supply business unit from Golden, Colo. Wilks is a native of the Texas Panhandle and formerly served as president of Southwestern Public Service Company.

The celebration is planned as a time to see old friends and remember a storied history that brought about one of the nation’s best-designed and most efficient coal-fueled power plants.

Harrington’s story is rooted in the energy crisis of the early 1970s when the cost of natural gas began to rise. Traditionally SPS generating stations were powered by the area’s abundant and cheap natural gas. Tightening supplies, increased demand nationwide and national energy policy shifts led company officials to begin thinking about other sources of fuel just as the region began an economic boom in the early 1970s.

Concurrently, mining companies and railroads began to develop what would become one of the nation’s largest sources of coal - Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. The Wyoming coal is highly valued because it is low in sulfur, which allows for more efficient and cleaner combustion than traditional sources of coal.

The BNSF Railway, then known as the Burlington Northern, provided an almost direct link between the Texas Panhandle to the Powder River Basin, and the stage was set for coal-fueled generating technology in the Texas Panhandle.

An in-house team at SPS designed three steam-driven generating units at Harrington Station that, when fully operational, have the capacity to generate a total of more than 1,000 megawatts of electricity. The design team would go on to develop the Tolk Generating Station near Muleshoe before being spun off into a subsidiary company known as Utility Engineering, or UE. This company is now part of San Antonio-based Zachry Group, Inc.

The designs for Harrington Units 1, 2 and 3 called for the virtual elimination of particulate emissions. Unit 1, the first to come online in late 1976, uses an electrostatic precipitator where an electrical charge ionizes suspended particles and causes them to move toward collecting electrodes, thus removing them from the air. When Units 2 and 3 came online in 1978 and 1980, they featured large “baghouses” that act much like vacuum cleaner bags collecting particulates before they reach the outside air.

Perhaps the most noticeable impact of Harrington Station, however, is its conservation of precious freshwater supplies. Nearby Nichols Station, a gas-fired generating plant, began using treated sewage effluent for its cooling towers in 1960. Harrington also was designed to use treated effluent, and together the two plants have saved billions of gallons of freshwater over the past 46 years. With the completion of a new pipeline from another City of Amarillo sewage treatment plant, both Harrington and Nichols will be run almost entirely on recycled water by next summer.

 “This power plant has essentially been the backbone of our economy for 30 years, and it’s done its job well without adversely affecting the world around it,” said Dale Williams, plant director since 1999. “It’s built with advanced technology, but its greatest strength has been the men and women who planned it, designed it, built it and those who continue to operate it.”

Xcel Energy (NYSE: XEL) is a major U.S. electricity and natural gas company with regulated operations in eight Western and Midwestern states. Xcel Energy provides a comprehensive portfolio of energy-related products and services to 3.3 million electricity customers and 1.8 million natural gas customers through its regulated operating companies. Company headquarters are located in Minneapolis. More information is available at www.xcelenergy.com.

Harrington Facts

Named for Donald D. Harrington, noted Amarillo businessman, philanthropist and former chairman of the board for Southwestern Public Service Company.

Location: Two and one-half miles north of the intersection of Lakeside Drive and State Highway 136, northeast of Amarillo.

Fuel: Boiler fuel is low-sulfur, sub-bituminous coal from Wyoming.

Electrical Generating Capacity:
Unit 1 - 346 mw
Unit 2 - 360 mw
Unit 3 - 360 mw
Total - 1,066 mw

Completion Dates:
Unit 1 - 1976
Unit 2 - 1978
Unit 3 - 1980

Cost:
Unit 1 - $105 million
Unit 2 - $99 million
Unit 3 - $132 million
Replacement costs today would exceed $1.5 billion.

Employees: Harrington Station employs 109 people. An operating crew must be at the plant 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.