The Huntley plant in the Town of Tonawanda was once the virtual ash tray of Erie County.

In 2004, the most recent data available, Huntley was ranked the fifth top polluter in the state by the New York Public Interest Research Group. It ranked third in the state for emissions of arsenic gases, first for chromium and second for acid.

Since then, after political pressure, expensive lawsuits and public lashing, the plant has taken momentous strides toward cleaning up its act.

Throughout its 90-year lifetime, the plant has gone through several owners and name changes. The most recent took place in 1999, when the plant was sold to NRG Energy Inc.



In the beginning

One of the area’s industrial legacies, the plant produced electricity by burning coal. It was initially constructed in 1916, owned by Charles R. Huntley.

Huntley was owned by Niagara Hudson when Al Shockwell began working for the plant in 1948. When he retired in 1991, he was chief steam operator in the operations department.

Shockwell’s department employed about 800 people at one time. Over time, as new technologies replaced older systems, manpower was needed less and less, he said.

At one time, utilities were vertically integrated, said Steve Brady, a former employee of Niagara Mohawk. Niagara Mohawk, now incorporated into National Grid, once owned the plant.

“We did everything from making the power to sending you the bill for it,” Brady said. “Huntley was a pretty big piece of our overall mix of generating capacity for a long, long time.”

Shockwell witnessed some of the plants major transformations — at a period when the plant was spewing pollutants far beyond the borders of the Tonawandas.

In the 1980s, Niagara Mohawk spent $16 million to install scrubbers in the smoke stacks, which controlled the amount of fly ash emitted into the air, Shockwell said.

“The smoke from the stacks used to go to Williamsville,” he said.

The fly ash found in the smoke is a soot that can carry toxic chemicals, said Jason Babbie, senior environmental policy analyst for New York Public Interest Research Group. However, scrubbers and other technologies can catch the ash before it goes through the smoke stack.

It was the emissions of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide — which can contribute to acid rain and health problems like lung cancer — that ultimately lead to the lawsuit against the plant in 2000, filed by the state.

Last year, NRG was eventually ordered to cut production from 780 megawatts of power a day to 400 megawatts.

Balancing benefits

The fragile balance between benefit to the community and environmental risk has been a tenuous issue, almost since the plant broke ground.

The plant has served as an integral part of the community in the Town of Tonawanda, Supervisor Ronald Moline said.

“The Huntley plant has been around for almost 100 years and has played an important role in providing electric power,” he said.

Huntley currently operates four units, which produce 552 megawatts of power, said Raymond Long, director of the Northeast region for NRG. That many megawatts is capable of producing power in 552,000 homes.

Throughout the years, the plant provided thousands of jobs to Tonawanda residents, and as new technology emerges, employment potentials grow. In June, NRG announced plans to build a new plant, with 85 to 100 permanent jobs on the way.

A clean tomorrow

Several updates and installations have taken place within Huntley, said Steve Brady, a former employee of Niagara Mohawk. Brady currently works for National Grid, the company that purchased Niagara Mohawk in 2004.

“I don’t want anybody to get the impression that it’s 1916 technology in that plant,” Brady said. “There’s been lots of upgrades within the plant.”

At different periods, upgrades to physical equipment reduced the amount of emissions, Brady said. At one point, plant officials also changed the type of coal burned in the facility to create cleaner emissions.

NRG is currently in the process of organizing a four-year upgrade to the plant. The upgrade would retire 172 megawatts and replace two of its four units with a brand-new clean coal facility, Long said. The new facility would add an additional 458 megawatts of energy.

“Basically, what we’re talking about is almost doubling the size of the plant now and achieving major emissions reductions in the facility,” he said.

The plant will see a 90 percent decrease in mercury emissions, a 74 percent decrease in nitrogen oxide emissions and an 85 percent decrease in sulfur dioxide emissions, Long said.

It’s the first step of a long staircase to becoming environmentally compatible with — in addition to being a continued economic force in — the Tonawandas.