New Johnsonville, TN: TVA Implodes 1951 Coal-Fired Power Plant

(Satellite)

(New Johnsonville was built when the original one was drowned by Kentucky Lake.)

This generating station had 10 units. The last four units were shutdown in 2017. Six units had already been shutdown in 2012. The first unit entered commercial operation on Oct 27,1951, and the 10th unit went online on Aug 20, 1959. It was TVA's oldest powerplant. TVA was in violation with EPA regulations and replaced the plant with a 1,133mw combustion turbine plant that has 16 GE simple cycle combustion turbines. [PowerMag, TVA-fossil] 

This source says the combustion turbine plant has 20 GE units for a capacity of 1,269mw. The first unit went online in 1975 and the last unit was 2000.       Actually, 16 units were installed in the 1970s and four units were added in 2000. [TVA-lakeinfo]

The plant may have been VA's oldest, but in its last three years of operation it was also the most reliable! "The mark of success is the equivalent forced outage rate, or EFOR, which measures when a unit is forced into a condition that limits it from operating at 100 percent. Johnsonville’s employees broke the all-time plant—and possibly a TVA coal plant—EFOR record of .24 EFOR in the summer of 2014. They have continued to keep the EFOR low for the past three years." It produced an average of 1,350mw per year. [TVA-shutdown] If 1,350mw is the average, than its nameplate capacity would be even more. So the 1,269mw combustion turbine plant is not a complete replacement of capacity. 

It was blown up on July 31, 2021.

Screenshot
Sally Weber Kristen shared
Eddy Sanders: Wonder how many jobs were lost by closing it? Ingram used to have a contract were they hauled something like 80 percent of the coal for TVA. [Ingram is a barge company.]

TVA-fossil

They have improved the efficiency of the single-cycle turbines by adding a heat-recovery steam generator to supply steam to the nearby Chemours plant that makes titanium dioxide. [TVA-shutdown] And they plan to use the site of the old plant to replace some of the single cycle turbines with aeroderivative turbines. [TVA-demolition] An aeroderivative does not appear to be a combined-cycle turbine, so they are only 45% efficient and generally used for peaker plant operation. Thus they are not a good replacement for a coal-fired plant because those plants generate a base load.

The remaining 4 coal-fired units were providing steam to the Chemours plant. TVA spent $5.4b on pollution control for those units. The current turbines are also typically operated only during peak demand periods. So not only is the capacity of the replacement smaller, it is less efficient. The reduced efficiency means more CO2, and fuel costs, than an efficient combined-cycle turbine. [TVA-lakeinfo] I wonder how much of the $5.4b became "stranded assets."

While taking photos of the CSX/NC&StL Bridge, my wife also took a photo of this powerplant.

20151219 7612, cropped

This source makes the following statement: "By 2035, TVA plans to add about 10,000 megawatts of solar power. To do this, the utility plans to use natural gas to keep the power system reliable as coal plants retire." I just cannot make sense out of that verbage.

Another satellite image that will be disappearing.

Satellite