OK, you just said that a gas plant has two stages: gas turbine, and (secondary power) steam turbine. The steam turbine is run by a boiler using waste heat from the gas turbine. A coal plant uses a boiler/coal combo to drive a steam turbine. The generation part of an existing coal plant IS the secondary stage of a gas-fired plant.

Power plants often have multiple boilers so that generation can be matched to demand. A coal-powered plant already has a steam control system and steam turbines driven by each boiler. That's the second stage of the gas powered plant. Yes, any boiler that will remain must be retrofitted to heat using the gas turbine exhaust instead of coal. So, add gas turbines to heat one or more existing boilers on site (that gets retrofitted for heat source) and you've got a new plant without tearing down an entire infrastructure. A 3-line plant may be scaled back to 2-line because there would be two stages to each line (original steam turbines + added gas-fired turbines).

This would make sense!

Wether we like it or not EPA has a loud voice and coal fired plants days are numbered. Very unfortunate. I thought the installation of scrubbers was supposed to make them happy. Guess not.

It's hard to imagine that there is just no technology available that can make it possible to utilize all that available coal to make electricity at a safe enough level of emissions. I'm no expert on scrubbers and such but it just seems like with all the technology we are capable of producing, that we can't solve this one. Like has been mentioned already, I bet there is a lot more to this deal involving behind the scenes agendas than what's being reported.

They do have the technology buts it's very expensive.