POWER August 2011 - 26

PLANT OF THE YEAR
KCP&L's Iatan 2 Earns POWER's
Highest Honor
Kansas City Power & Light (KCP&L) began engaging stakeholders in 2003 to develop
consensus on a regional energy plan designed to balance customers' desire for
low electricity costs with system reliability needs and environmental requirements.
The culmination of that plan was the completion of Iatan 2, which entered service
in August 2010. For executing an innovative energy plan that reduced overall fleet
emissions, ensuring the region's future electricity supply, and completing an approximately
$2 billion project in time for the summer 2010 peak load by using innovative
contracting and project controls, KCP&L's Iatan 2 is awarded POWER's 2011
Plant of the Year Award.
By Dr. Robert Peltier, PE
Courtesy: KCP&L
K
CP&L, headquartered in Kansas City,
Mo., serves about 820,000 customers
in western Missouri and eastern Kansas.
Great Plains Energy Inc. is the holding
company of Kansas City Power & Light and
KCP&L Greater Missouri Operations Co.
(GMO, the former Aquila, purchased in July
2008). However, KCP&L is the brand name
used to represent both of these utilities.
KCP&L has an installed capacity of approximately
6,700 MW. Its coal-fired Iatan
Station, located about 30 miles northwest of
Kansas City, near Weston, Mo., features the
recently renovated approximately 700-MW
Unit 1 and the 850-MW (net) Unit 2, which
went into service in August 2010 (see Table
1). Iatan 2 (Figure 1) was KCP&L's first
new baseload plant in nearly three decades.
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In addition, this milestone marked the finale
of KCP&L's Comprehensive Energy Plan
(CEP), initiated seven years earlier. The plant
is named after Iatan, a chief of the Otoe tribe
that fought battles with the Comanche (also
called Iatan) around 1800.
The Plan
In 2003, KCP&L began updating its energy
development plans to meet expected regional
demand growth for itself and its project partners.
The goal of the CEP was to add needed
baseload capacity while lowering the utility's
overall emissions by strategically adding
renewable energy projects and investing
in energy efficiency, a synergistic package
of improvements benefiting all stakeholders.
KCP&L's fuel mix is about 80% coal, 17%
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nuclear (Wolf Creek Generating Station was
the last baseload generation built, in 1985),
2% natural gas and oil, and 1% wind.
Specifically, the CEP proposed development
of about 100 MW of wind energy, upgrading
the air quality control equipment on
Iatan 1, a selective catalytic reduction (SCR)
system for LaCygne 2, a number of transmission
and distribution system upgrades, a
demand-side management program designed
to help ratepayers reduce consumption, and
the development of Iatan 2. William Downey,
executive vice chairman and the company's
senior executive on the project, noted in an
interview with POWER, " When Iatan 2 was
being built, it was one of the largest and most
complex construction projects in KCP&L
and Missouri history. Because of the benefits
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POWER August 2011

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