Where does your power come from?

This evening we visited the Duke Energy coal-fired power plant at Miami Fort Station. Driving up to it in the evening darkness, you could see the stacks from miles away and with the flickering of the aircraft warning lights it looked pretty darn impressive.

Originally built in 1925, the facility has been recently updated with lots of new environmental equipment to clean the exhaust and convert by-products of the process into useful materials (like gypsum that goes into drywall and the fly ash, that is used in asphalt). Everything was on the scale of gigantic, from the stacks themselves, to the enormous scrubbers that were recently completed and the great big 525 MW GE turbines. The entire site covers 25 acres and produces enough power for about 12 million 100-watt lightbulbs. We saw coal being loaded off the barges, the wastewater treatment plant, coal firing in the burners (very hot!!!), the turbines and the big control room of Unit 8. The people at Duke who stayed late to show us around were great, and we all learned a lot about the process and the business of converting coal to electric.