LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- With the worst of winter and soaring electric demand likely over, the city of Sikeston, Missouri, has cut back its weekly train deliveries of Powder River Basin 8,800 Btu/lb coal, although it probably will increase them again in the run-up to summer, a city official said Monday.
"We're down to one train now" per week, "basically as winter is winding down," Rick Landers, general manager of the Sikeston Board of Municipal Utilities, told S&P Global Platts in an interview.
The current inventory at Sikeston's 261-MW power plant is about 40 days, Landers said, a bit less than the normal target level of 45 days.
The plant's stockpiles had topped 100 days a few years ago.
Sikeston is not part of a regional wholesale power market and has total control over dispatching its plant.
"We're not being dispatched by the market," Landers noted, "and we've been running a pretty high capacity, about 85 percent."
"If we continue running the unit the way we're running it, we would be pulling down the stockpile because one train can't keep up with it, and we would put a second train on in a couple of months," he said.
That probably will happen anyway, said Landers, as summer nears and brings with it the typically hot weather and high power demands in the Sikeston area of southeastern Missouri.
Sikeston's power plant is 37 years old and is good operating condition, Landers said. At present, there is no talk among city officials about retiring it or repowering it with natural gas.
Typically, Sikeston burns just under 1 million st of coal annually, all from Arch Coal mines in the PRB.