The Dickerson Generating Station is an 853 MW electric generating plant owned by

NRG Energy NRG Energy, Inc. is an American energy company, headquartered in Houston, Texas. It was formerly the wholesale arm of Northern States Power Company (NSP), which became Xcel Energy, but became independent in 2000. NRG Energy is involved in energ ...

, located approximately two miles west of

Dickerson, Maryland Dickerson is an unincorporated community in Montgomery County, Maryland. It is on Maryland Route 28, between Sugarloaf Mountain and the Potomac River. It is a community near the town of Poolesville, Maryland. Dickerson is . History Dickerson wa ...

Description

The facility consists of three 182 MW

coal Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal is formed when dea ...

-fired steam generating plants, two 147 MW gas and oil-fired simple cycle combustion

turbine A turbine ( or ) (from the Greek , ''tyrbē'', or Latin ''turbo'', meaning vortex) is a rotary mechanical device that extracts energy from a fluid flow and converts it into useful work. The work produced by a turbine can be used for generating e ...

s, and one 13 MW

black start A black start is the process of restoring an electric power station or a part of an electric grid to operation without relying on the external electric power transmission network to recover from a total or partial shutdown.Knight, U.G. ''Power ...

and peaking turbine. The three coal-fired units are base-loaded and went into operation in 1959, 1960, and 1962 respectively. Condenser cooling for these units is accomplished with once-through

cooling water Cooling tower and water discharge of a nuclear power plant Water cooling is a method of heat removal from components and industrial equipment. Evaporative cooling using water is often more efficient than air cooling. Water is inexpensive and non ...

from the

Potomac River The Potomac River () drains the Mid-Atlantic United States, flowing from the Potomac Highlands into Chesapeake Bay. It is long,U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map. Retrieved Augus ...

at a rate of up to per day. Coal is delivered to the Dickerson Generating Station by

CSX Transportation CSX Transportation , known colloquially as simply CSX, is a Class I freight railroad operating in the Eastern United States and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. The railroad operates approximately 21,000 route miles () of track. ...

train. The two combustion turbines are

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable energ ...

Frame 7F

gas turbine A gas turbine, also called a combustion turbine, is a type of continuous flow internal combustion engine. The main parts common to all gas turbine engines form the power-producing part (known as the gas generator or core) and are, in the directi ...

s which went into operation in 1992 and 1993, and are normally fired with

natural gas Natural gas (also called fossil gas or simply gas) is a naturally occurring mixture of gaseous hydrocarbons consisting primarily of methane in addition to various smaller amounts of other higher alkanes. Low levels of trace gases like carbo ...

from a Consolidated Natural Gas company

pipeline Pipeline may refer to: Electronics, computers and computing * Pipeline (computing), a chain of data-processing stages or a CPU optimization found on ** Instruction pipelining, a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a s ...

which traverses the Dickerson site. The generation plant's site property abuts the

Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park is located in the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland. The park was established in 1961 as a National Monument by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to preserve the neglected remains of ...

, which follows along the Potomac River. The

C&O Canal The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, abbreviated as the C&O Canal and occasionally called the "Grand Old Ditch," operated from 1831 until 1924 along the Potomac River between Washington, D.C. and Cumberland, Maryland. It replaced the Potomac Canal, wh ...

structures nearest to the plant are Lock 27 and the

Monocacy Aqueduct The Monocacy Aqueduct — or C&O Canal Aqueduct No. 2 — is the largest aqueduct on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, crossing the Monocacy River just before it empties into the Potomac River in Frederick County, Maryland, USA. The 438 foot (133. ...

History

The Dickerson plant began service in 1959.Mirant Corporation
"Dickerson Generating Plant."
Accessed 2010-05-24. All of the generating plants were built by the

Potomac Electric Power Company The Potomac Electric Power Company (PEPCO) is an American utility company that supplies electric power to the city of Washington, D.C. and to surrounding communities in Maryland. It is owned by Exelon. The company's current trademarked slogan i ...

, which sold them to the

Southern Company Southern Company is an American gas and electric utility holding company based in the southern United States. It is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with executive offices also located in Birmingham, Alabama. The company is the second largest ...

in December 2000 as a result of the restructuring of the electricity generating industry in Maryland. The station was included in the spin-off from the Southern Company of Mirant in April 2001. Mirant was merged into

GenOn Energy GenOn Energy, Inc., based in Houston, Texas, United States, was an energy company that provided electricity to wholesale customers in the United States. The company was one of the largest independent power producers in the nation with more than ...

in 2010, and GenOn merged into NRG in 2012. In 1991, the -long cooling water discharge channel from the power plant, which empties into the Potomac River, became the

Dickerson Whitewater Course The Dickerson Whitewater Course, on the Potomac River near Dickerson, Maryland, was built for use by canoe and kayak paddlers training for the 1992 Olympic Games in Spain. It was the first pump-powered artificial whitewater course built in No ...

, a canoe and kayak training facility for the 1992 Olympic Games. In December 2009, a $1.1 billion emissions upgrade was completed. A new stack and cooling system reduced the amount of waste heat going into the cooling water discharge channel. In 2013, NRG filed notice that it planned to decommission the coal generators by 2017, citing state emissions requirements. In May 2015, NRG filed notice to delay deactivation until May 2019. In February 2016, NRG withdrew its de-activation notice for the coal-fired units. In May 2020, GenOn Holdings announced it would retire the three coal generating units, citing unfavorable market conditions and increased costs associated with environmental compliance. The coal units were shut down later in 2020.

Pollution

In August 2016 the

Maryland Department of the Environment The Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) is a government agency in the state of Maryland that implements and enforces environmental protection laws and programs. The agency's stated vision is "Healthy, vibrant and sustainable communities a ...

(MDE) fined Dickerson $1 million for releasing illegal amounts of nitrogen into the Potomac River. In August 2018 MDE required the Dickerson plant to meet current federal wastewater standards (

effluent guidelines Effluent Guidelines (also referred to as Effluent Limitation Guidelines (ELGs)) are U.S. national standards for wastewater discharges to surface waters and publicly owned treatment works (POTW) (also called municipal sewage treatment plants). The Un ...

) by November 2020. The plant discharges

arsenic Arsenic is a chemical element with the symbol As and atomic number 33. Arsenic occurs in many minerals, usually in combination with sulfur and metals, but also as a pure elemental crystal. Arsenic is a metalloid. It has various allotropes, but ...

and

mercury Mercury commonly refers to: * Mercury (planet), the nearest planet to the Sun * Mercury (element), a metallic chemical element with the symbol Hg * Mercury (mythology), a Roman god Mercury or The Mercury may also refer to: Companies * Merc ...

to the Potomac River according to 1980s-era standards under expired permits. Upgrading the plant's treatment systems to Maryland's current standards "could reduce discharges of toxic metals by 97 percent." The

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an independent executive agency of the United States federal government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970; it be ...

published the updated federal standards in 2015.

Operations

NRG operates the coal-fired units as base load generation and the combustion turbines as peaking generation. The Dickerson Generating Station is dispatched by the

PJM Interconnection PJM Interconnection LLC (PJM) is a regional transmission organization (RTO) in the United States. It is part of the Eastern Interconnection grid operating an electric transmission system serving all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentu ...

regional transmission organization A regional transmission organization (RTO) in the United States is an electric power transmission system operator (TSO) that coordinates, controls, and monitors a multi-state electric grid. The transfer of electricity between states is considered i ...

. In 2008 the plant's

flue-gas desulfurization Flue-gas desulfurization (FGD) is a set of technologies used to remove sulfur dioxide () from exhaust flue gases of fossil-fuel power plants, and from the emissions of other sulfur oxide emitting processes such as waste incineration. Methods ...

system consumed 190,000 tons of

limestone Limestone ( calcium carbonate ) is a type of carbonate sedimentary rock which is the main source of the material lime. It is composed mostly of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of . Limestone forms whe ...

and generated 310,000 of synthetic gypsum.

Montgomery County Resource Recovery Facility

200px, Trash train returning from Dickerson plant (on Dickerson spur line), going back to Derwood, Maryland The Montgomery County Resource Recovery Facility, a 56 MW generating

incineration Incineration is a waste treatment process that involves the combustion of substances contained in waste materials. Industrial plants for waste incineration are commonly referred to as waste-to-energy facilities. Incineration and other high ...

plant that burns municipal

garbage Garbage, trash, rubbish, or refuse is waste material that is discarded by humans, usually due to a perceived lack of utility. The term generally does not encompass bodily waste products, purely liquid or gaseous wastes, or toxic waste produc ...

and

waste Waste (or wastes) are unwanted or unusable materials. Waste is any substance discarded after primary use, or is worthless, defective and of no use. A by-product, by contrast is a joint product of relatively minor economic value. A waste prod ...

, is next to the Dickerson Generating Station. This

waste-to-energy Waste-to-energy (WtE) or energy-from-waste (EfW) is the process of generating energy in the form of electricity and/or heat from the primary treatment of waste, or the processing of waste into a fuel source. WtE is a form of energy recovery. Mo ...

plant is served by the CSX

railroad Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport that transfers passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, which are incorporated in tracks. In contrast to road transport, where the vehicles run on a pre ...

line, which delivers trash from a central collection center in Derwood to the plant. The facility began operations in 1995 and is operated by the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority, a

state-owned corporation A state-owned enterprise (SOE) is a government entity which is established or nationalised by the ''national government'' or ''provincial government'' by an executive order or an act of legislation in order to earn profit for the governmen ...

.Maryland State Archives. Annapolis, MD
"Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority."
''Maryland Manual.'' October 10, 2008.

References