Duke Energy Progress LLC on May 22 notified regulators that by the end of the month it will retire the 66-MW unit 5 at its Darlington County natural gas plant in South Carolina.
The unit will be retired May 31, nearly two years earlier than its previously scheduled March 2020 retirement date.
"The Darlington CT Unit 5 has served [Duke Energy Progress] customers well over its useful life but, based upon the unit's condition and economic evaluations following a fire event on January 2, 2018, the company determined that this unit will no longer provide economic and reliable commercial service to customers," the Duke Energy Corp. subsidiary wrote in a May 22 filing with the North Carolina Utilities Commission.
Duke Energy Progress on June 30, 2017, retired the 65-MW unit 9 at its Darlington County gas-fired plant, also earlier than originally planned.
The company in its 2017 integrated resource plan said it would retire units 1-8 and 10 at the Darlington County gas plant, representing 580 MW of capacity, in 2020.
