The Allen Combined Cycle Plant is a 1.1-gigawatt (1,100 MW)

natural gas power plant A gas-fired power plant or gas-fired power station or natural gas power plant is a thermal power station which burns natural gas to generate electricity. Natural gas power stations generate almost a quarter of world electricity and a signifi ...

located south of

Memphis, Tennessee Memphis is a city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the seat of Shelby County in the southwest part of the state; it is situated along the Mississippi River. With a population of 633,104 at the 2020 U.S. census, Memphis is the second-mos ...

that began generating electricity in 2018. It is operated by

Tennessee Valley Authority The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned electric utility corporation in the United States. TVA's service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina ...

(TVA).

Background

TVA announced plans that the

Allen Fossil Plant The Allen Fossil Plant was a 741-megawatt ( MW), coal power plant located south of Memphis, Tennessee. It generated electricity from 1959 to 2018. At the time of its closure, the plant was operated by Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). History Memp ...

would be replaced with a $975 million natural gas plant in order to reduce emissions by 2018 set by a 2011 agreement with the

Environmental Protection Agency A biophysical environment is a biotic and abiotic surrounding of an organism or population, and consequently includes the factors that have an influence in their survival, development, and evolution. A biophysical environment can vary in scale f ...

(EPA). The TVA had plans to utilize

greywater Greywater (or grey water, sullage, also spelled gray water in the United States) refers to domestic wastewater generated in households or office buildings from streams without fecal contamination, i.e., all streams except for the wastewater from ...

from the nearby Maxson Wastewater Treatment Plant, but was determined to be unviable and expensive. Instead, the TVA drilled

well A well is an excavation or structure created in the ground by digging, driving, or drilling to access liquid resources, usually water. The oldest and most common kind of well is a water well, to access groundwater in underground aquifers. The ...

s on the Memphis Sand Aquifer to use for the plant's cooling source. During subsequent testing of groundwater and alluvial aquifer in the vicinity of the combined cycle plant, TVA discovered that water contained

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

lead Lead is a chemical element with the symbol Pb (from the Latin ) and atomic number 82. It is a heavy metal that is denser than most common materials. Lead is soft and malleable, and also has a relatively low melting point. When freshly cu ...

which raised concerns that use of the on-site wells may lead to cross-contamination of the Memphis Sand aquifer. As a result, the use of wells on site was suspended and all water for the plant was supplied from the MLGW system. As MLGW could not supply sufficient steady-state water flow to operate the combined cycle plant at full capacity in summer, TVA constructed four water storage tanks with 10 million gallon total capacity. The Allen Combined Cycle Plant went into commercial operations on April 30, 2018. In addition to the natural gas plant, there is a 1 MW solar farm on site. The facility is also expected to burn biogas produced by the nearby Maxson wastewater treatment and

biogas plant Biogas is a mixture of gases, primarily consisting of methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide, produced from raw materials such as agricultural waste, manure, municipal waste, plant material, sewage, green waste and food waste. It is a ...

References

External links

Allen Combined Cycle Plant
{{Tennessee Valley Authority Facilities Energy infrastructure completed in 2018 Tennessee Valley Authority Buildings and structures in Memphis, Tennessee Natural gas-fired power stations in Tennessee

Background

See also

References

External links