Eagle Valley natural gas plant expected to come back online after nine months shut down

Updated Feb. 14 at 1:14 p.m.

A natural gas plant in Morgan County that’s been down for more than nine months could be up and running again before the end of June. That’s according to the utility AES Indiana, formerly known as Indianapolis Power & Light, which operates the Eagle Valley plant.

The plant was shut down for maintenance in late April. AES said when employees tried to restart it in November, a steam pipe overheated and ruptured. 

READ MORE: State to investigate AES charges for natural gas plant outage

Because the plant has been offline, the utility had to buy power off the energy marketplace costing the company at least $1.2 million. The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission is still deciding whether AES customers will have to foot that bill.

AES Indiana said the utility will have a better idea of what happened during the restart attempt and a more specific timeframe for when the plant can come back online by the end of March.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story said the photo shown was of the Eagle Valley natural gas plant. That was incorrect. The previous photo shown was of the Eagle Valley Generating Station — a coal plant that was later replaced by the current natural gas plant. That photo was removed and replaced with a photo of the Eagle Valley natural gas plant.

Contact reporter Rebecca at rthiele@iu.edu or follow her on Twitter at @beckythiele.

Indiana Environmental reporting is supported by the Environmental Resilience Institute, an Indiana University Grand Challenge project developing Indiana-specific projections and informed responses to problems of environmental change.