Widows Creek Fossil Plant (also known as the Widows Creek Power Plant) was a 1.6-gigawatt (1,600 MW)

coal power plant A coal-fired power station or coal power plant is a thermal power station which burns coal to generate electricity. Worldwide, there are about 8,500 coal-fired power stations totaling over 2,000 gigawatts capacity. They generate about a th ...

, east of Stevenson, Alabama, USA. The plant, operated by the

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 Carolin ...

, generated about nine billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. It had one of the tallest chimneys in the world at , which was built in 1977, and was removed December 3, 2020 in a controlled demolition. Along with the Chimney of the Harllee Branch Power Plant, it is the tallest chimney to be demolished in the United States.

History

Initially, six identical 140-

MWe The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer. The watt is named after James Watt ...

units were built between 1952 and 1954. Two more units (575 and 550 MWe name-plate capacity) were added in 1961 and 1965. The last load of coal was delivered to the plant on September 18, 2015, with only one of its eight generation units working. The coal was enough to power Unit 7 until September 23, 2015. Widows_Creek_Fossil_Plant-2

Accidents and incidents

On January 9, 2009, the plant experienced a dam break on a gypsum slurry pond, and spilled up to of waste (possibly including boron,

cadmium Cadmium is a chemical element with the symbol Cd and atomic number 48. This soft, silvery-white metal is chemically similar to the two other stable metals in group 12, zinc and mercury. Like zinc, it demonstrates oxidation state +2 in most of ...

, molybdenum and

selenium Selenium is a chemical element with the symbol Se and atomic number 34. It is a nonmetal (more rarely considered a metalloid) with properties that are intermediate between the elements above and below in the periodic table, sulfur and tellurium, ...

) into the creek of the same name on the property, inundating it with an ashlike substance.

EPA compliance agreement

On April 14, 2011, the

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an Independent agencies of the United States government, independent executive agency of the United States federal government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon pro ...

(EPA) announced a settlement with the Tennessee Valley Authority to resolve alleged Clean Air Act violations at 11 of its coal-fired plants in

Alabama (We dare defend our rights) , anthem = "Alabama" , image_map = Alabama in United States.svg , seat = Montgomery , LargestCity = Huntsville , LargestCounty = Baldwin County , LargestMetro = Greater Birmingham , area_total_km2 = 135,765 ...

Kentucky Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north; West Virginia and Virginia ...

, and

Tennessee Tennessee ( , ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to th ...

. Under the terms of the agreement, the entire Widows Creek plant was affected: * Units 1–6 were retired in stages of two units per year, beginning by July 31, 2013 and ending by July 31, 2015 * Units 7 & 8 were to be fitted with

selective catalytic reduction Selective catalytic reduction (SCR) is a means of converting nitrogen oxides, also referred to as with the aid of a catalyst into diatomic nitrogen (), and water (). A reductant, typically anhydrous ammonia (), aqueous ammonia (), or a urea () ...

(SCR) devices to reduce their emissions of nitrogen oxide ()

Future

On June 24, 2015,

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, a multinational technology company, announced it would invest $600 million to install a data center on land made available by the retirement of Units 1-6. A renewable power capacity equivalent to the data center's needs will be added somewhere on the TVA system, so the data center will run on renewable energy. The project broke ground in April 2018.

References

External links