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| Street View, Aug 2012 |
That coal pile extended a long way to the left.
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| Street View, Aug 2012 |
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| James Way-Burch, Jan 2020 |
The nuclear power plant was also still standing in 2017.
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| Bojidar 93, Mar 2017 |
What is the brown ground all about?
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| Bojidar 98, Mar 2017 |
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| Mining #Shorts posted Genoa Station #3 was one of Wisconsin’s most recognizable coal-fired power plants, sitting along the Mississippi River in Vernon County, just south of La Crosse. Owned by Dairyland Power Cooperative, the 345-megawatt unit entered service on July 16, 1969, and became a long-running workhorse for cooperative power customers across the Upper Midwest. Its location made the site unusual. Genoa had already hosted fuel-oil generation, then the La Crosse Boiling Water Reactor, Wisconsin’s first nuclear power facility, which operated from 1967 to 1987. The coal plant became the site’s longest-serving chapter. For 52 years, Genoa Station #3 supplied electricity through cold winters, summer demand peaks and decades of changing power markets. But by 2020, Dairyland’s board voted to retire the plant, citing age, operating economics and a broader shift in its generation mix. The unit stopped generating on April 11, 2021, and was officially retired on June 1, 2021. Its final act came in March 2024, when crews demolished the 500-foot stack and main building. Contractor Veit removed 13,000 tons of steel from the boiler house and stack during the last phase, along with 42,380 tons of crushed concrete. For Genoa, it marked the end of more than half a century of coal-fired generation on the Mississippi. The plant is gone, but its history still reflects an era when big centralized coal units carried rural electric systems for decades. |
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