'Power City' landmark will be no more as Xcel readies power plant in Granite Falls for demolition

Jul. 5—GRANITE FALLS

— Granite Falls has long called itself the "power city," and its high school teams were once known as the Kilowatts, a name still kept by the town's amateur baseball team.

Some of that can be attributed to a hydroelectric dam operated by the city since 1911, but more than anything, it was the presence of Northern States Power and its Minnesota Valley steam generating plant that gave this community its claim to energy fame.

It will be gone this November.

"It's going to be a drastic landscape change when I drive through," said Tim Brown, operations manager with Xcel Energy, which owns the facility. The nine-story-tall Minnesota Valley plant, with twin stacks rising 280 feet above the Minnesota River, has been as prominent a feature of the valley scenery in Granite Falls as the IDS Tower is to the Minneapolis skyline.

The Minnesota Valley plant has not generated power since 2004. Xcel Energy has a contractor on site preparing it for demolition. Structural demolition is expected to start in August. Possibly in September, the contractor will use explosives to implode the remaining portion of the structure, according to Brown and other Xcel officials.

They hosted a farewell tour of the facility for city representatives, and retired workers from the plant, on June 29.

The facility was originally built by Northern States Power. In 1997, Xcel Energy was formed by the merger of NSP and New Century Energies of Denver.

"Going to be a big change for all of us," said Mayor Dave Smiglewski as participants joined for the tour. "NSP has been a great partner for Granite Falls," he said.

Retired workers gave the company good marks as an employer, too.

"It was always a challenge," said retiree Odell Rude, speaking about operating the power plant. Rude began his career as a janitor at the plant and advanced in the ranks to become its manager before he retired.

Others found similar opportunities. Fellow retiree Dallas Iverson began his career as a janitor in 1964 and retired in 1995 as a lead operator. He recalled using fire hoses to clean out gummed-up coal when he began his work. The plant originally burned eastern coal, but later used a cleaner-burning coal from Wyoming's Powder Basin.

Verlyn Kling said he began his career at the plant in 1966, fresh out of the Navy where he had served in the engine rooms of ships during the Vietnam War. A native of Montevideo, Kling said he came to Granite Falls to interview at the NSP plant and the Rodgers Hydraulics manufacturing plant after a friend told him there were job openings.

Rodgers hired him on the spot with a wage of just over $1.60 an hour. Two weeks later, NSP called and offered him just over $2.60 an hour. He retired from NSP in May 2000 as an electrician at the plant.

Northern States Power originally built a two-boiler, 20-megawatt, coal-fired power plant at its site in 1929. It was first fired in 1930, according to Jim Bodensteiner, an environmental engineer with more than 37 years of experience with NSP and Xcel.

"It was a huge boost to the town during the Depression," Mayor Smiglewski said.

In 1953, it added a third, 40-megawatt boiler and the steel-sided facility that stands 85 feet above the river. A crowd of 7,000 attended the opening of the expanded plant at that time, according to a newspaper article from the event. The article dutifully reported that 350 gallons of coffee and 6,200 doughnuts and 5,000 cookies were served to the crowd, along with other treats.

The Minnesota Valley plant was a baseload plant for NSP. It generated 75 megawatts of electricity around the clock, seven days a week. That was large for its day, but for perspective, the Sherco I and II plants that comprise Xcel's Sherburne County Generating Station have a combined capacity of 2,500 megawatts.

As time advanced, the plant transitioned from a baseload plant to an intermediate plant. It was called on to provide power to the grid during peak demand times. Northern States Power retrofitted the plant to use natural gas in place of coal, but also operated the plant for peaking power by burning coal, according to the retirees. Iverson recalled how the natural gas was used to ignite the coal for production.

Along with the plant, NSP operated a hydroelectric station downstream of the Minnesota Valley plant. The company operated the hydro plant until 1961, and removed the dam in early 2013. The dam had provided a reservoir on the river to provide cooling water for the coal plant.

There is a lot of work to complete before the plant site is converted to a "green field."

The company still has approximately 16,000 cubic yards of ash and contaminated soil to remove that is located within the alignment of the former plant rail spur to the company's Sherco plant in Becker, according to Anna Thill, community relations manager for Xcel. That's 1,000 dump-truck loads.

At the Minnesota Valley plant site, the company estimates it will be able to recycle about 10,000 tons of clean concrete from the foundations for use as an aggregate material.

It will remove all of the steel, aluminum and copper and recycle it. It is hoped their sale will offset 20 to 25% of the costs of the removal project.

The company also hopes to salvage and recycle the exterior brick facade of the 1930s building.

At tour's end, the retirees gathered around a table holding memorabilia and articles about the plant through its history. All but one of the retirees participating in the tour had spent their entire working careers at the plan.

The lone exception was Rick Barber, a Granite Falls native who took on assignments elsewhere with Xcel. He worked at the plant from 1992 to 1996, and told his fellow retirees he had only one regret: "I wish it would have been longer."

It's a sentiment some of the city officials expressed about the plant and its nine decades long association with the community.