Clean Energy Utah — An Update

Not far from one of the most beautiful spots in the world, Arches National Park (as shown in the photo below), Moab, the Green River, and the Colorado River, there is a massive new green energy project, the Green River Energy Center, which is under construction (as shown in the lead photo above).

The project is located close to the massive Hunter 1577MW and Huntington 1000MW coal-fired power plants near Castle Dale, Utah, shown in the two photos below.

What’s to become of these huge coal power plants as cheaper clean energy with no recurring fuel costs start to replace them? Recently Rocky Mountain Power, which owns the plants, planned to shut them both down by 2032. However, the latest plans for the plants call to keep them operating indefinitely. The plants would not operate at full capacity, but would just produce just enough to backfill for the solar and wind plants at night and during calm weather.

On my fact-finding tour of the region, I stopped at the little historical town of Helper. Helper gets its name from the use of helper locomotives to get over the 7500-ft Soldier Summit Pass between Huntington and Spanish Fork, Utah. I happen to sit down at a diner next to a coal miner who worked nearby. The miner told me that the entire output of the mine goes to the Hunter Power Plant. To my surprise, he told me that the coal goes not by rail but by truck to the power plant, as you see in the photo below.

The Green River Energy Center will consist of a very large 400MW solar farm as shown under construction in the lead photo, and a massive 1600MWh battery storage facility. In my previous article on the subject, I showed images of a Tesla Megapack storage system, but it turns out that those images were simulations or from another facility. When I visited the site on February 10, 2025, the huge solar farm as shown in the lead photo was under construction, but the construction of the Tesla Megapack storage system had not yet begun. The Green River Energy Center is just south of the Hunter plant. It also turns out that solar farms have also already been constructed both north and south of the Hunter plant. One small portion of one is shown below.

Why is this happening, and why here? A big reason for the construction is the commitment by Meta (Facebook) to exclusively power its data centers with clean energy. One of them is the huge facility in Eagle Mountain, Utah County, Utah, as shown below. The solar farm and battery storage facility will be able to supply all the power needed for the data center, at least on the longer sunny days in summer.

Why here? These solar facilities will use the transmission networks already in place for the coal power plants. The photo below shows the Hunter Power Plant Electrical Substation, where power from the plant begins its journey to customers.

It turns out that Meta is not the only customer which demands clean power from Utah. About 100 miles south of me, 130 miles south of Salt Lake City, in Delta, is the Intermountain 1900MW coal fired Power Plant (IPP) shown in the photo below.

The customer for the electricity from the plant is the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. After this year, the LADWP will no longer purchase power from coal-fired plants. IPP is looking to convert to completely clean energy by 2045. Therefore, IPP is in the process of converting the plant to a 70% fossil gas/30% green hydrogen mix to power a combined cycle gas turbine by the end of 2025. A combined cycle gas turbine uses waste heat from the gas turbine to produce steam. The steam is then used to power turbines like in a conventional thermodynamic plant. The goal is to convert to 100% green hydrogen by 2045. There will be an electrolysis plant built on site to produce the green hydrogen.

Strangely, the electricity for the plant will come up the same power lines that run to California for the output of the plant. I assume they will be sourcing clean California solar power. Hopefully it will come from mid-day periods when California has a surplus of solar power. It would seem to make more sense to generate the power for the green hydrogen from local solar farms, especially as they go to 100% green hydrogen. Utah has plenty of barren land and copious sunny days for the solar farms and you don’t have to worry about the lack of electricity at night when making green hydrogen.

However, I agree with the arguments made by CleanTechnica authors that clean hydrogen is extremely impractical and uneconomic for use to fuel cars, buses, trucks, and airplanes. It makes much more sense to use batteries for cars, buses, and trucks. The Delta site has underground salt domes that will be used to store the green hydrogen. If the power from California is excess that would be curtailed anyway and it is not necessary to compress the hydrogen, a couple of the major efficiency robbing characteristics of hydrogen use would be eliminated.

I understand that the Trump administration has already killed all leases for offshore wind. It is already moving quickly to kill subsidies for electric vehicles, EV charging, onshore wind, and solar power. However, the financial balance for clean wind and solar is so strong, and with companies like Meta and institutions like LADWP demanding clean power, it won’t be able to stop new onshore clean power generation entirely.

On my next fact finding trip I plan to visit one of Utah’s geothermal power plants. I will discuss geothermal power in my next article. I believe in the clean power bible written by Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford University. He explains why Wind, Water, and Solar are the only practical and economical means to convert the world quickly to clean energy. He knows that the present generation of geothermal power plants need to be located in the relatively few regions of the world with hot enough rocks and water close to the surface. Therefore, he has not included using geothermal in the short term to convert the world to clean energy. I will discuss the promise of deeper sources of thermal energy in more locations that may possibly be accessed in the future.

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