Duke/Fluor Daniel Land Power-Plant Contract

Fluor Corp. and Duke Power Co. of Charlotte, N.C., Thursday jointly announced winning a contract valued at $450 million to build a coal-fired electric plant in South Carolina.

The joint-venture company, Duke/Fluor Daniel, will build a 385-megawatt coal plant for South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. The plant will be in Orangeburg County, S.C., and is expected to generate enough power for about 385,000 homes, Fluor Daniel spokeswoman Deborah Land said.

Construction is scheduled to begin in November, 1992, and commercial operation would start in 1996, according to Parks Cobb, Duke/Fluor Daniel’s executive vice president of operations. The project should employ about 950 workers and most would come from the existing work force of the parent companies, Cobb said. Duke/Fluor Daniel currently has 250 employees.

Duke Power will provide most of the engineering staff while Fluor Daniel, a subsidiary of Irvine-based Fluor Corp., will supply the construction workers, Cobb said. The company already has begun preliminary engineering work and is in the process of obtaining state environmental permits for the project.

This is the largest project that the joint-venture company has won since it was formed in September, 1989, bringing its sales total to $670 million. The firm anticipates $1 billion in sales by 1994.

This will be South Carolina Electric’s first power plant since 1974, when it built a nuclear generator, company spokesman Robin Montgomery said.

“This new plant will help us meet customer growth (averaging 2.5% annually) in the future, particularly in the Charleston City area, which is one of our largest cities,” he said. The utility plans to retire its aging power plants.

The new plant will add 10% more capacity to the utility’s total generating capacity of 3,891 megawatts, Montgomery said. South Carolina Electric now serves about 446,000 customers in the state.

The power industry will need significant additional capacity over the next several years as power plants begin to age, according to Cobb at Duke/Fluor Daniel. And at least a third of that new capacity is expected to be in coal-fired plants.

“The return to nuclear power is being held off by reforms in the licensing process enacted by the federal government; that’s why coal and natural gas will be the fuel of choice in the 1990s,” Cobb said.

Ronald Barnes, senior project director at Duke/Fluor Daniel, will oversee the plant’s construction.