AUTHOR: ALICIA NIEVES
SOURCE: 16 WNEP THE NEWS STATION
SALEM TOWNSHIP – Hard hats and shovels in hand, dozens of state and local representatives celebrated the groundbreaking of the Caithness Moxie Freedom Power Plant in Salem Township.
“It’s quite a big generating facility in the area. It’s one of the largest that’s being built at this time. It’s quite a large project,” said Colin Trebilcock, Senior Project Manager.
Trebilcock is overseeing this nearly $1 billion project to build a natural gas generating power plant. It will supply power to about 900,000 homes and businesses in the area.
“The bottom line for consumers is we are going to utilize natural gas, which we found in abundance in Pennsylvania. We are going to utilize it in the most efficient conversion system to make electricity,” said Ross Ain, Vice President of Caithness Energy.
“People want that in their houses. They want to be able to have fuel efficiency. So being able to produce more energy here in Pennsylvania it gets us out of the foreign oil markets,” said Representative Tarah Toohill of Pennsylvania’s 116th district.
The construction phase of this project will create about 200 to 600 temporary jobs, mostly for construction workers. But long-term, this power plant will hire about 25 people.
“This is a highly automated plant with modern data systems coming into the control room so the actual jobs are very skilled operator jobs typical of the industry today,” Ain added.
Construction on this plant is expected to take almost three years. The new natural gas plant should open in May of 2018.
