Landmark Granite Falls power plant demolished

GRANITE FALLS, Minn. -- An iconic piece of a western Minnesota town's landscape is gone.

Xcel Energy owns the Minnesota Valley Generating Plant, also known as the former NSP Plant, that towers over Granite Falls. It was a critical source of energy in the region for 70 years, though it hadn't been used since the 2000s. This morning Xcel and Veit Disposal imploded the plant.

 "Everybody knows they are coming to Granite Falls when they see the stacks," said Verlyn Kling, a former employee.

Sporting NSP jackets and the hard helmets they wore while they worked at the plant, Kling and Dallas Iverson spent the morning reminiscing.

"It was fun. It was a lot of hard work," Kling said.

"I couldn't wait to get to work. It was so wonderful. It was a great place to work," said Iverson.

And it was a major source of power from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Hundreds of employees helped produce electricity for farms and towns between the Twin Cities and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

"This plant reached the end of its life. Seventy great years of providing electricity," said John Marshall, Xcel's region VP for Minnesota and the Dakotas.

With its working days long over, Xcel and Veit had been planning to use explosives to implode the building. They scheduled Thursday for demolition day. Kling and Iverson arrived early to see it go.

"There's a big bang and then there's an echo that happens and then you'll watch everything crumble," said Marshall.

It took just seconds for the building to come down. Xcel said the plan now is to remove the concrete, brick and metal and then re-seed the land with the hope of returning it to its natural habitat.

Mother Nature will eventually reclaim the property with prairie grass. It'll be different for the town too. A changing outlook on energy and now a changing skyline in Granite Falls. The landmark is gone, but the lifelong friendships remain.

"It's very tough to see it go. It's such a landmark for coming into town or whatever. It's tough to see it go," said Iverson.

The plant burned coal to produce electricity. Xcel says decommissioning the plant is part of their clean energy initiative.