After a catastrophic failure in April, the newest large coal-fired power plant in the United States is now expected to remain offline until March 2027, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Sandy Creek, a single-unit, 932-megawatt (MW) plant, is 64% owned by LS Power Development, 25% by the Brazos Electric Power Cooperative and 11% by the Lower Colorado River Authority.
The failure and two-year-long closure of Sandy Creek highlights the reliability risks of fossil-fueled power, and reinforces the need for wind, solar and battery sources that are cheaper, faster to build, more distributed and more reliable The failure marked the second time since it was built that a major failure at the plant has rendered it unable to operate for a year or more.
The plant was first shut down at the end of February, a time when many coal plants conduct maintenance to prepare for summer, and remained offline through April 21. On April 22 and 23, the plant was restarted. Power output slowly increased across the day on April 23, almost reaching its full output by 9 PM. But shortly after 11 PM, a major failure appears to have taken place; the unit shut down completely and has not run since.
ERCOT had been reporting that the unit would remain out of service until June 1, 2026, a significant outage of more than a year. But the grid operator now says that Sandy Creek is not expected back online until March 31, 2027—a total outage of more than two years—in its latest Monthly Outlook for Resource Adequacy, released Sept. 5. The plant’s owners have said little publicly about the cause of the outage.
Source: S&P Capital IQ
This is the second time a catastrophic failure followed by a long-term outage has happened at Sandy Creek. When construction was almost complete in late 2011, the plant was expected to become operational in early 2012. But during testing in October 2011, the boiler was so badly damaged that it prompted Standard & Poor’s to lower its financial rating on the project. Repairs ultimately took more than a year, with the plant finally starting commercial operations in May 2013.
The evolution of how utilities, investors and developers value power generation resources in Texas became crystal clear during the period between the first outage at Sandy Creek in 2012, and this outage, which will stretch from 2025 through early 2027.
In 2012, ERCOT added 1,474MW of wind capacity, to reach 11,138MW total. Solar power was just getting started, with the state adding a mere 30 MW to reach 72 MW. Dispatchable battery storage was also in its infancy, and none was added in 2012 to the existing 36 MW. It would be a decade before battery storage installations took off.
Those figures are in stark contrast to what is being added during this outage at Sandy Creek. In 2025 and 2026 alone, ERCOT expects to add 16,619 MW of utility-scale solar (to reach 45,963 MW capacity), 15,708 MW of battery storage (to reach 25,725 MW), 2,071 MW of wind (to reach 41,541 MW), and just 1,606 MW of all types of gas generation (to reach 44,277 MW of highly efficient combined-cycle plants, a figure that risen less than 1 megawatt since 2017, and 26,122 MW of other types of gas plants, which are used mostly during periods of high power demand). No large coal-fired power plant has been added in Texas, or anywhere else in the U.S., since Sandy Creek came online.
The market’s preferences for generating power in Texas could not be clearer. In 2013, the EIA reported that coal provided 38.1% of Texas’ power; gas accounted for 42.2%, nuclear 9.8%, solar 0.04%, and wind 9.2%. By 2024, coal had fallen by two-thirds to 12.6%. Meanwhile, gas rose to 47.8%, nuclear was 7.4%, solar rose to 7.6%, and wind soared to 24%.
The outages at Sandy Creek are also reminiscent of the operating problems at another major new coal plant. Comanche 3, a 750-MW coal-fired unit in Colorado that came online in 2010 and is majority-owned by state-regulated utility Xcel Energy. From its opening, it had a history of unexpected and costly outages, capped by a year-long closure starting in January 2020 that was caused by a catastrophic loss of lubricating oil, extensively damaging the turbine and generator.
Facing a backlash from ratepayers and the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, Xcel ultimately reached an agreement to close the plant in 2030, some 40 years earlier than its originally planned retirement. As part of that settlement, Xcel also agreed to gradually step down the use of the plant between 2025 and 2030.
This agreement may soon be challenged by the Trump administration, which is trying to keep coal plants across the country from closing —regardless of the cost to ratepayers and the reliability of the plants—under the guise of an energy emergency and 90-day orders to stay open from the U.S. Department of Energy.
In the case of Sandy Creek, the financial cost to LS Power, the Brazos Electric Power Cooperative and the Lower Colorado River Authority will likely be steep. In addition to millions of dollars in repairs, there is the loss of revenue from power generation and the cost of replacing that lost electricity, even as the original cost of building the plant must continue to be paid off.
Failures like those at Sandy Creek and Comanche 3 highlight why developers have focused on the construction of cheaper, more distributed, faster-to-build, and more reliable sources like wind, solar, and dispatchable battery storage.