Crane falls on west Michigan power plant

PORT SHELDON, MICHIGAN - Consumers Energy said it is investigating the collapse of an outdoor crane onto a building at its J.H. Campbell Generating Complex in Port Sheldon, west of Grand Rapids.

The Jackson-based utility, a unit of CMS Energy, said the 300-foot crane boom fell onto a building that houses the complex's Unit 3 power plant recently.

Neither the crane nor the plant were in operation at the time, according to officials.

There were about 100 Consumers Energy employees and contract workers in the building at the time of the accident.

One person was taken to a local hospital and later released.

"We've initiated an investigation to determine the contributing factors to the accident," said Dennis McKee a spokesman for Consumers Energy. "There were high winds and I'm sure that the speed of the wind will enter into our assessment of what the contributing factors may have been."

Unit 3 is in the middle of a routine outage for the installation of emissions control equipment.

"We don't know what impact this will have on our outage schedule," McKee said.

Operations at Campbell Units 1 and 2 were unaffected and those units continue to generate electricity.

The Campbell Complex is a coal-fired electric generating facility comprised of three power plants capable of producing up to 1,440 megawatts of electricity. That's enough power to meet the residential, commercial and industrial needs of about a million people.

Consumers Energy provides natural gas and electricity to nearly 6.5 million of Michigan's 10 million residents in all 68 Lower Peninsula counties.

Related News

U.S. Electricity Sales Projections

U.S. Electricity Sales Projections Continue to Fall

NEW YORK - Electricity producers and distributors are in an unusual business. The product they provide is available to all customers instantaneously, literally at the flip of a switch. But the large amount of equipment, both hardware and software to do this takes years to design, site and install.

From a long range planning perspective, just as important as a good engineering design is an accurate sales projections. For the US electric utility industry the most authoritative electricity demand projec-tions come from the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA). EIA's compre-hensive reports combine econometric analysis with judgment calls on…

READ MORE
portland general electric

Portland General Electric Program Will Transform Hundreds of Homes Into a Virtual Power Plant

READ MORE

ontario powerlines

Ontario Providing Support for Industrial and Commercial Electricity Consumers During COVID-19

READ MORE

EU Flag

No deal Brexit could trigger electricity shock for Northern Ireland

READ MORE

Electricity turns garbage into graphene

READ MORE