Danskammer Generating Station is located on the shore of the Hudson River in the Town of Newburgh, New York, United States, upstream of the larger oil-fired Roseton Generating Station. Danskammer 'units 1 and 2 burn natural gas as a primary fuel, and oil as a backup fuel (72 and 73.5 MWe nameplate capacity), whereas units 3 and 4 are exclusively fired with natural gas (147.1 and 239.4 MWe nameplate capacity).
The station was built by Central Hudson Gas & Electric in the 1950s, and sold to Dynegy in 2001 as part of electricity deregulation. Dynegy sold the plant to Helios Power Capital, LLC in 2013, who in turn sold it to Mercuria Energy Group; Mercuria sold it to Tiger Infrastructure, a private equity firm based on 5th Avenue in New York City, and Agate Power. As of 2018, it is owned by Danskammer Energy, LLC. In 2018, Danskammer Energy filed an application with the New York State Public Service Commission to build a new, larger plant uphill of the current site that would be a more efficient combined cycle facility with an air cooled condenser to reduce water draw, and which would run as a baseload station (able to run all the time), rather than a peaker plant (running just a few hours per week). The peaker plant has been the target of a prolonged environmental lawsuit over its cooling system. The proposed baseload plant is also garnering community protest, as it would increase air pollutants in an already environmentally sensitive area. PFAS chemicals in the water supply of the City of Newburgh have resulted in a residential population which has a lowered immune response and higher cancer risk. Emergency asthma admissions in the City of Newburgh are 2.5 times higher than the New York State Average. As of January 2021, 25 communities have passed resolutions opposing the plant expansion.
History
The name Danskammer is Dutch for "Dance chamber". On their voyage upriver in 1609 Henry Hudson's crew supposedly saw Native Americans dancing around a fire at the site and thought they were looking at "the Devil's dance chamber". There was once a lighthouse, Danskammer Point Light, at the site.
The Danskammer station was built by Central Hudson Gas & Electric and opened in 1952.
Sale to Dynegy
In 2001 Central Hudson sold both Roseton and Danskammer to Dynegy for $903 million, under new rules deregulating electricity, in order to become just a distributor of power. Central Hudson added a facility that allowed the plant, which had previously received coal only by rail, to receive coal from self-unloading ships.
Environmental concerns
Shortly after the Dynegy acquisition, environmental activists began to raise concerns about the plant's emissions. According to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) figures, it was among the top ten releasers of pollutants by weight in New York, releasing 1.4 million pounds () of hazardous emissions in 2000. Dynegy defended its operation of the plant as entirely within its permits.
The environmental group Riverkeeper took note of the long-overdue renewal of the plant's discharge permit from the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). In common with Roseton and Indian Point Energy Center, its use of once-through cooling, in which river water was pumped in, used to cool the plant, then pumped out warm, dated to the 1950s and was responsible for large fish kills in the river. A state judge had voided the permit, but it was reversed on appeal. After DEC rebuffed Riverkeeper's effort to force it to accelerate the process, and ruled that closed-cycle cooling, the environmental group's preferred alternative, was not feasible at Danskammer, Riverkeeper filed suit against DEC and Dynegy alleging violations of state administrative-procedure law in issuing the new permit. They alleged that DEC had accepted Dynegy's argument that it didn't have space to install closed-cycle cooling despite the company owning large tracts of adjacent vacant land, and that it had allowed Dynegy to account for its water withdrawals in an unrealistic fashion. Dynegy says there are cheaper alternatives to the cooling towers a closed-cycle system would require.