Competitive Power Ventures is known for building efficient and technologically advanced gas-fired facilities. The company’s Fairview Energy Center is its latest achievement, transforming a brownfield site into an economic engine.
Innovation is a cornerstone of today’s power generation sector, with new power plants using technologies that make today’s generation stations cleaner, more cost-effective, and certainly more efficient. Along with providing electricity to the communities they serve, these plants are economic engines, bringing jobs and serving as revenue streams, in addition to allowing cities and towns to repurpose industrial sites that otherwise could fall into decay.
1. Local officials gathered with company executives at the groundbreaking for Competitive Power Ventures’ (CPV’s) Fairview Energy Center in 2017. From left to right, Mark Pasquerilla, president, Greater Johnstown Regional Partnership; Bruce Baker, Jackson Township supervisor; Eiichi Inamura, chairman, Osaka Gas USA; Gary Lambert, CEO, CPV; Katy Wilner, regional general manager, GE Power; and Mike Resca, CPV’s senior vice president of renewable development. Courtesy: CPV
Such is the case with Competitive Power Ventures’ (CPV’s) Fairview Energy Center in Jackson Township, in Cambria County, Pennsylvania. The 1,050-MW natural gas-fired facility sits on a remediated brownfield site, once home to a petroleum storage facility and salvage yard. CPV worked with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) and local officials to clean up the site, enabling the start of construction in August 2017 (Figure 1). The $1 billion plant came online in December 2019, months ahead of schedule, and today serves as a model for how an energy company and a power plant can help rebuild a region.
“We’re excited to bring a plant with this kind of economic development potential to this part of the country,” said Tom Favinger, a CPV vice president and CPV Fairview’s asset manager, when the plant came online late last year. That potential, which is already being realized, along with CPV Fairview’s many other attributes, make it more than worthy of a POWER Top Plant award.
