Tohoku Electric Power plans to decommission Niigata Thermal Power Station’s last operational unit, the LNG-fired 109MW Unit 5, in March 2028, the company announced on October 1, 2025. The plant is expected to cease operations about 65 years after its first unit was brought online in July 1963.
“In recent years, the number of operating opportunities has decreased significantly due to the increase in renewable energy and other factors,” said the company. It added that it decided to scrap the unit comprising two 54.5MW combined-cycle gas turbines after “comprehensively evaluating future supply and demand trends and the outlook for securing supply capacity.”
Like Unit 1, the plant’s 125MW Unit 2 was also commissioned in 1963. Two additional 250MW units were added in 1966 and 1969, respectively. The original pair was decommissioned between 1983 and 1984. Units 3 and 4 followed in 2009 and 2018. All four of the original units were dual-fuel, natural gas and oil-fired.
Unit 5 was commissioned in July 2011, replacing some of the capacity lost with Unit 3’s decommissioning. A sixth, 34MW emergency unit was added to the power plant between January 2012 and March 2015 following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.
Niigata Thermal Power Station is currently the smallest of the utility’s eight thermal plants totaling over 10GW. The largest include the 4.2GW LNG-fired Higashi-Niigata and the 2GW and 1.8GW coal-fired Haramachi and Noshiro.
Once decommissioned, Tohoku EPCO may redevelop the site for a grid-scale storage or renewable generation project due to its existing access to the grid, following the examples of Shikoku Electric Power, which built a 2MW solar plant and a 12MW/35.8MWh BESS facility on land previously occupied by Matsuyama Thermal Power Station, and Kansai Electric Power, which is developing a 99MW/396MWh battery system at the former Tanagawa Thermal Power Station.
