Akron, Ohio, March 8, 2022 – Energy Harbor Corp. announced today its Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Oak Harbor, Ohio, was taken offline at 12:16 a.m. on Saturday, March 5, for regularly scheduled refueling and preventive maintenance.

 

While the unit is offline, about a third of the unit’s 177 fuel assemblies will be replaced. Preventive maintenance and safety inspections to ensure continued safe and reliable operations also will be performed on major components including various pumps, valves, reactor vessel, steam generators, and turbine generator. In total, more than 10,000 work activities representing well over 100,000 hours of work will be completed during the refueling outage.

 

Approximately 1,000 temporary contractor workers, specialized vendors and Energy Harbor employees will supplement more than 575 Davis-Besse employees during the outage. The additional workforce will provide a multi-million-dollar boost to the local economy as workers stay in area hotels, eat in local restaurants and frequent area stores.

 

Also during this outage, work will be performed to support the Department of Energy (DOE) funded zero-carbon hydrogen production demonstration project at Davis-Besse in collaboration with Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Xcel Energy, and Arizona Public Service.

 

The demonstration project is expected to be operational in 2024 and will demonstrate the technical feasibility of a hybrid hydrogen production system in order to facilitate large scale commercialization. Energy Harbor’s Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Nuclear Officer, David Hamilton said, “We are committed to working alongside the DOE and INL to demonstrate nuclear’s ability to provide clean, carbon free hydrogen to the manufacturing and transportation sectors. Zero carbon hydrogen is an important component of the clean energy transition currently underway, and we look forward to our role as an early leader in nuclear hydrogen production.”

 

The 908-megawatt Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station has operated safely and reliably, generating more than 13 million megawatt hours of electricity since the completion of its last refueling in March of 2020.

 

Energy Harbor is a premier carbon free power producer and fully integrated retail energy provider. We operate the second largest non-regulated nuclear fleet in the country capable of powering more than 3.5 million homes and businesses annually.

 

We are a highly reliable provider of carbon free baseload electricity committed to Environmental, Sustainability and Governance (ESG) principles critical to meeting the nation’s emissions goals and accelerating the country’s clean energy transition.

 

Our success is driven by our unwavering employee commitment to safe, reliable operations, financial stability and best in class service to meet our customer energy and sustainability needs.