The W.A. Parish Generating Station is a 3.65-gigawatt (3,653
MW), dual-fired power plant located near
Thompsons, Texas
Thompsons is a town in Fort Bend County, Texas, Fort Bend County, Texas, United States, within the Greater Houston, Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown metropolitan area. The population was 246 at the 2010 census.
Geography
Thompsons is located ...
. The station occupies a 4,664-acre site near
Smithers Lake
Smithers Lake is an artificial impoundment in Fort Bend County, Texas, collecting water from Dry Creek. It is located south of the Brazos River, southeast of Richmond, and is completely within the city limits of Thompsons.
The project is owned ...
southwest of
Houston
Houston (; ) is the most populous city in Texas, the most populous city in the Southern United States, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, and the sixth-most populous city in North America, with a population of 2,304,580 in ...
in
Fort Bend County
Fort Bend County is a county located in the U.S. state of Texas. The county was founded in 1837 and organized the next year. It is named for a blockhouse at a bend of the Brazos River. The community developed around the fort in early days.
The ...
and consists of two four-unit plants; one
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 ...
and the other
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 ...
(2,697 MW).
With a total installed capacity of 3,653 MW, it is the second largest
conventional power station in the US, and supplies about fifteen percent of the energy in the Houston area.
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 ...
owns and operates the plant.
The
Powder River Basin
The Powder River Basin is a geologic structural basin in southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming, about east to west and north to south, known for its extensive coal reserves. The former hunting grounds of the Oglala Lakota, the area is very s ...
supplies three 115-car trainloads worth of low-sulfur coal to units 5-8 or 36,000 tons daily.
Completed in January 2017, the post-combustion
Petra Nova
The Petra Nova project is a coal-energy-sector/clean-energy project designed to reduce carbon emissions from one of the boilers of a Fossil fuel power station, coal burning power plant in Thompsons, Texas. It is a multi-million dollar project take ...
Carbon Capture Project became largest installed on an existing power plant in the world. The system pumped 1.6 million tons of filtered
carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide (chemical formula ) is a chemical compound made up of molecules that each have one carbon atom covalently double bonded to two oxygen atoms. It is found in the gas state at room temperature. In the air, carbon dioxide is transpar ...
() from unit 8 to the West Ranch Oil Field 82 miles away in
Jackson County. Overall as the system was powered by natural gas it was expected to have a net effect of not releasing 785,000 tons of carbon annually. The system cost approximately $1 billion, but was idled in 2020 due to the low price of oil during the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...
.
Adjacent to Parish Station is the natural gas Brazos Valley Power Plant owned by
Calpine Energy which opened in 2003.
Notable Incidents
During the
2021 Texas power crisis
In February 2021, the state of Texas suffered a major power crisis, which came about during three severe winter storms sweeping across the United States on February 10–11, 13–17, and 15–20. The storms triggered the worst energy infr ...
, Parish Station was reported to have experienced up to a 664 MW loss in generation capacity, including an 80 MW decrease in capacity early in the crisis that contributed to the need for rolling blackouts.
The Unit 8 turbine, which has a generating capacity of 610 MW, caught fire the night of May 8th, 2022. While there were no injuries reported, this turbine was heavily damaged and remained offline as of August 2022, with generating capacity expected to be restored by May 2023.
See also
*
List of largest power stations in the United States
This article lists the largest electrical generating stations in the United States in terms of current installed electrical capacity. Non-renewable power stations are those that run on coal, fuel oils, nuclear, natural gas, oil shale and peat, ...
*
List of power stations in Texas
This is a list of electricity-generating power stations in the U.S. state of Texas, sorted by type and name. In 2019, Texas had a total summer capacity of 125,117 MW through all of its power plants, and a net generation of 483,201 GWh. ...
References
External links
{{Commons category, W. A. Parish Power Plant, WA Parish Generating Station
Coal-fired power stations in Texas
Buildings and structures in Fort Bend County, Texas
Natural gas-fired power stations in Texas
NRG Energy