South Texas Nuclear Power Plant to Increase Power to Grid by 1.4%

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). The South Texas Project Electric Generating Station (STPEGS) (Wadsworth, Texas) has received approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to increase the capacity of unit #1 from 1,250 megawatts (MW) to 1,268MW, an increase if 1.4%, and plans to do the same to unit #2 during its fall outage this year. This will bring the power output capacity to 2,536MW for the station.

According to an engineer at the site the increase of power is being accomplished by the NRC allowing STPEGS to increase the amount of thermal energy per unit from 3,800 Thermal MW to 3,856 Thermal MW. STPEGS did an analysis showing the NRC that they could safely produce an additional 56MW of thermal energy per unit which translates into an additional 2 degrees Fahrenheit, thereby increasing steam capacity to the Siemens Westinghouse steam turbine/generator and thus increasing capacity by 18MW of electricity. This will be accomplished by replacing four steam generators in each of the Westinghouse nuclear pressurized water reactors and enlarging the steam outlet valves.

STPEGES is a nuclear power station whose units came online in August 1988 and June 1989 and are two of the ten youngest units in the United States. STPEGES is operated by STP Operating Company for the owners: Austin Energy 16% (Municipal Utility) (Austin, Texas), AEP-Central Power & Light 25.2% (Corpus Christi, Texas), a wholly-owned subsidiary of American Electric Power, an Investor Owned Utility (IOU) (NYSE: AEP) (Columbus, Ohio), City Public Service 28% (Municipal Utility), and Reliant Energy -HL&P 30.8% (Houston, Texas), a totally owned subsidiary of Reliant Energy also an IOU (NYSE: REI) (Houston, Texas).