The steel industry is just giddy on new and upgrades to steel mills. Google the subject and you’ll find — the Minnesota Steel & Iron project in Itasca County, MN, the upgrade of the Pacific Steel Casting mills in Berkeley, CA, and Brazilian steel company CSN’s plans to build a steel-rolling mill in Kentucky, among others, in recent news. For whatever the reason, mill developers see an increased demand for their product providing impetus for increased capacity. A key economic factor for additional milling capacity is the availability of steady, low-cost power supplies for their mills.
This bodes well for the power industry in at least one respect — mills represent a high load factor customer, not a lot of MW installed required for the annual energy consumption. However, they do pose new challenges to maintaining reliability and power quality.