By William Opalka

Closure of the FitzPatrick nuclear plant will leave New York at least 325 MW short of its generation requirement by 2019, according to a new assessment from NYISO.

The assessment, released Thursday, was ordered following Entergy’s announcement last year that the 882-MW plant would close at the end of its current fueling cycle, later this year or early in 2017.

“The resource deficiency equates to approximately 325 MW statewide but would likely require more than 325 MW of new or retained capacity resources to resolve, depending on forced outage rates and the location of the resources,” the assessment says.

NYISO is requesting solicitations for a “gap solution” from market participants that may include generation, transmission or demand response to address the shortfall. The RTO normally addresses reliability needs biennially but said the expected shortfall in 2019 requires action now.

About 2,600 MW of capacity is expected to leave the New York fleet by mid-2017. Besides FitzPatrick, NYISO has already lost, or is expecting to lose, the coal-fired plants Dunkirk, Cayuga and Huntley, along with the Ginna nuclear plant. (See Entergy Rebuffs Cuomo Offer; FitzPatrick Closing Unchanged.)

Currently inactive or close to deactivation are a 50-MW biomass plant in Niagara Falls and several gas peaking units in New York City. (See TransCanada may Mothball 3 NYC Gas Peakers.)

An 820-MW gas-fired plant in southern New York is expected to be in service by March 2018 and several transmission upgrades planned by mid-2020 are expected to mitigate the plant closures.

The assessment says new resources would be less effective to the state overall if they were added to Zone A in western New York. “Due to transmission system limitations between Zones A and B, capacity added in Zone A is not as effective as capacity added in other locations, unless that capacity also improves the transfer limitations,” it states.

Zone A is a relatively large area around Buffalo. Zone B is a narrow strip that runs from the Pennsylvania border to Lake Ontario and includes three nuclear power plants.

FitzPatrick Inspection

On Wednesday, meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission released an inspection report that identified two violations of “very low safety significance” at FitzPatrick.

In November the plant took one of its backup emergency diesel generators offline while another backup generator was being serviced. In December, Entergy failed to tell NRC when a secondary containment ventilation system was inoperable.

The report, which summarized NRC’s three-month inspection ending Dec. 31, also included a third violation, self-reported by Entergy and considered of low significance. The company said it discovered it was operating during its previous fuel cycle, from October 2013 to October 2015 without the required number of safety relief valves.