Increase In Safety Observations

In 2018, we increased our total number of safety observations across the campus by 40%, which has been key to the success of our overall safety program. Frequent observations allow our employees to work together to gather data about work practices and resolve issues before they become risks.

Reduction in Lost-Time Accidents

With safety as our core value, this huge improvement in safety performance is something we’re all very proud of. In 2018, our employees at both the power plant and the mine brought new energy to improving our safety culture, as well as to the programs and processes that have led to these results. Not only was our incident rate reduced, but so was the severity level.

CORESafety TEAM

Developed to help implement and facilitate the modules of the CORESafety system at Prairie State’s Lively Grove Mine, this team has the mission of creating innovative safety solutions for continuous improvements. They also focus on cultural and procedural safety improvements for the underground workforce, and on developing relationships with other CORESafety-certified companies.

ESHAG

The mine’s Employee Safety and Health Advisory Group (ESHAG) performs inspections and maintenance of underground emergency supplies and emergency transport vehicles. The team regularly meets with employees and focuses on interactions to ensure jobs are performed safely. This group also reviews all incident and near-miss reports, as well as root-cause analysis for the mine team.

Power Plant Safety Committee

This cross-sectional committee has employee representatives from all departments, and the maintenance and operations managers are attendant co-sponsors. It serves the important role of an advisory body to senior management on health and safety issues. Their goal is to promote a culture and environment that will effectively identify and manage risks and hazards, making sure every worker goes home safely.

Storm Team

The power plant’s Safety Through Observation, Reliability, and Mindset (STORM) team consists of eight members from various departments. The purpose of STORM is to reduce the number and severity of injuries at the power plant by generating and empowering a safety-conscious workforce through confidentiality, observation, feedback, education, and coaching of employees to better understand safety.

VPP Team

We developed the Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) team to define, facilitate, record, and execute all aspects of a “best in class” Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) VPP Star Site safety and health management system. The VPP team does this with specific measures, actions, and plant-wide ownership that results in lasting, effective safety processes.

Executive Safety Council

The Executive Safety Council provides overall governance of the power plant’s safety strategy and helps us achieve key safety metrics. They focus on understanding any exposures creating risks for team members so they can ensure the successful implementation of safety policies or initiatives.

CORESafety AND
VPP STAR CERTIFICATION

To achieve our vision of becoming the best coal mine and coal-fired power plant in the country, we have to first understand the highest standards of our industry. We are constantly benchmarking ourselves against industry peers, and through this comparison, we’ve found the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) and the National Mining Association’s (NMA) CORESafety system are industry best practices for safety processes.

Outage Planning and Execution

All power plants undergo routine maintenance outages, but it’s the planning and execution of those outages that dictates future operational success. Since inception, Prairie State has operated on an annual outage interval, but in 2018 we performed additional work during our fall maintenance outage on Unit 2 and spring maintenance outage on Unit 1. This will allow our power plant to extend future planned outage intervals to 18 months.

5.8% Increase in Mine Productivity

As the power plant’s availability improves, the mine has had to seek productivity improvements to meet an increasing demand for coal production. To that end, mine employees formed teams in 2018 to seek creative ways to improve productivity. These efforts led to marked improvements across all areas of the underground mine, and an overall increase of 5.8% in productivity.

Highest Annual Generation

In 2018, our power plant produced 11,532,418 net MWhs, the highest in Prairie State history. This annual generation exceeded the annual budget by more than 149,000 MWhs, which is equivalent to the one-week generation of a unit.

Highest EAF and Lowest Annual EFOR

Equivalent Availability Factor (EAF) and Equivalent Forced Outage Rate (EFOR) are directly correlated. We want EAF numbers to be high and EFOR numbers to be low, and in 2018, Prairie State’s power plant had the highest EAF and the lowest annual EFOR in campus history.

Highest Annual Tons of Coal Production

In 2018, the Lively Grove mine produced the highest annual tonnage in campus history: 6.3 million tons. It took a lot of teamwork, coordination, and strategic planning to achieve this budgeted target, but our mine team rose to the challenge.

As one of our core values, sustainability is at the forefront of our business strategy, and we want to ensure we’re providing long-term value to our member-owners and communities. We’ve developed programs that energize our ability to reduce our environmental impact, which we believe is an important part of our social responsibility.

Beneficial Reuse and Carbon Reduction

The beneficial reuse of coal combustion residuals (CCRs) such as gypsum, fly ash, and bottom ash has increased steadily over the past 30 years in the energy industry. Since 2015, Prairie State has continued to increase the beneficial reuse of its CCRs, effectively offsetting thousands of tons of CO2 while also providing economic benefit to our owners. In 2018, Prairie State achieved its best results for beneficial reuse and CO2 offsets. We saw a 22% increase in CO2 offsets compared to 2017.

Campus Recycling

Our team knows that recycling is a great way to help our natural environment thrive while being a socially responsible organization. To do our part, we recycled nearly 135,000 lbs of materials in 2018, along with over 14,000 gallons of used oil.

Community Impact

Prairie State and its employees have always invested in the surrounding communities through local partnerships with not-for-profit organizations. We encourage our employees to lead by example, and we believe our sustainability program should include community service. A few stats from 2018 include:

371 units of blood donated, saving up to 1,113 lives.

Over $1,875 collected to support the Marissa Food Pantry and Combatting Hunger on Weekends (CHOW) program

Clothing, toys, and other necessities donated to more than 140 local children through nine organizations.

Junior Achievement program delivered to 262 elementary school students.

Economic development, environmental stewardship, and youth program support for 75 local nonprofit organizations.

Stakeholder Outreach

The energy industry continues to garner a lot of attention from legislators and regulatory agencies at both the state and federal level. Prairie State works alongside its public power owners to raise awareness about our unique energy campus with key stakeholders.

In 2018, we continued efforts to build broad support for Prairie State at the local, state, and federal levels to ensure the longevity of our campus operations. We did this with the support of industry trade associations, and through lobbying and improving our focus on social media. This multi-level outreach and stakeholder collaboration is particularly important as proposals for energy policy are considered in our state and nation’s capitals.

• 15% increase in positive impressions across social media platforms
• 32% increase in Facebook and LinkedIn followers
• Hosted campus tours for 13 external stakeholder groups
• Filed official comments with the U.S. EPA on the pro posed Affordable Clean Energy Plan

Our energy campus provides baseload electricity to not-for-profit municipalities and rural electric cooperatives from across the Midwest. Our nine public power owners serve more than 2.5 million families and businesses across nine states.