Drake’s Fate: A look inside Colorado Springs’ power plant

It’s our thermometer on a cold morning — outlined by our sunrises and sunsets Colorado Springs’ Drake Power Plant is easily spotted from miles away when it shoots a plume of vapor up into the sky.

Most of us have never been in it, so we wanted to show you what goes on within the steel walls of the energy powerhouse that will shut down in 16 years.

Three years ago, Unit Five was decommissioned. The other two are still up and running. About seven train loads, each holding on average 14,500 tons of coal, are delivered to Drake each month. Burning to coal powers our homes and businesses, but that won’t be the case for long.

“No later than the year 2035, the board has directed us to decommission the plant,” said Colorado Springs Utilities General Manager John Romero.

“There are more cost-effective ways to become more renewable and to have safer better quality products long term,” Romero said. “Once we decommission this facility, we have to put new generation in place to replace the power that will be eliminated for this facility. Those resources are looking like wind, solar, battery storage in combination with natural gas resources.”

This is something that is already being done at the Clear Spring Ranch campus, south of Fountain.

“Instead of burning coal like [the Ray] Nixon [power plant] over there, we burn natural gas — basically we can make about all of the other power of Drake and Nixon combined,” said Bill Sunderland, superintendent for the Front Range Power Plant.

“When we start talking about renewables and solar and wind and things like that, you know the sun can kind of dart behind a cloud or the wind can stop blowing. As we lose those megawatts, we need something that will pick it up pretty quick and that’s what this plant can do,” said Sunderland.

This plant is an important one to consider moving forward because it can provide power for 259,000 homes.

With a solar array on the same campus, Clear Spring is ready to take over if this is the route the community decides on.

For now, the Drake facility can continue to provide low-cost power for a very long time.

Because this coal plant sits in the middle of downtown Colorado Springs on 40 acres of land, the land can be used for other things when it’s decommissioned.

But in the short term, moving to a new technology could be more costly, meaning decommissioning sooner could raise your rates.