Minnesota power regulators have given Xcel Energy preliminary approval to abandon an uprate project at its Prairie Island nuclear plant.
In its meeting Thursday, the state's Public Utilities Commission agreed with Xcel that finishing the $237 million project was no longer in customers' best interests, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. The decision will be final unless an objection filed within the next 15 days requires further PUC review.
Xcel has been weighing its options to address depressed energy forecasts in the region and plans to replace two aging coal generators in 2015. After the uprate decision, state regulators gave Xcel until March to analyze its options for meeting future power needs, possibly to involve new gas generation.
The PUC issued a certificate of need for the Prairie Island project in 2009. But since the uprate was first proposed, long-term forecasts for power demand growth in its service area declined by 40 percent. The project has been delayed from its original schedule, and in March Xcel asked to scale back its scope from 164 megawatts to 135 megawatts. The utility has already increased the amount of fuel in use at Prairie Island but will instead use it to extend the time between refueling outages from 18 months to 24 months.