A fossil fuel power station is a thermal power station which burns a fossil fuel, such as coal or natural gas, to produce electricity. Fossil fuel power stations have machinery to convert the heat energy of combustion into mechanical energy, which then operates an electrical generator. The prime mover may be a steam turbine, a gas turbine or, in small plants, a reciprocating gas engine. All plants use the energy extracted from the expansion of a hot gas, either steam or combustion gases. Although different energy conversion methods exist, all thermal power station conversion methods have their efficiency limited by the Carnot efficiency and therefore produce waste heat.
Homer City Generating Station is a decommissioned 2-GW coal-burning power station near Homer City, in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, USA. It is owned by hedge funds and private equity firms and is operated by NRG Energy. Units 1 and 2, rated at 660 MWe, began operation in 1969. Unit 3, rated at 692 MWe nameplate capacity, was launched in 1977. It employed about 124 people.
Eraring Power Station is a coal-fired power station consisting of four 720 MW Toshiba steam-driven turbo-alternators for a combined capacity of 2,880 MW. The station is located near the township of Dora Creek, on the western shore of Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, Australia and is owned and operated by Origin Energy. It is Australia's largest power station. The plant has two smokestacks rising 200 m (656 ft) in height. It is slated for closure by mid-2025, after a failed attempt to sell the loss making power station back to the state government.
Northern Power Station was located at Port Paterson in the Australian state of South Australia about 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) south of the city centre of Port Augusta. It was coal powered with two 260 MW steam turbines that generated a total of 520 MW of electricity. It was operated and maintained by Alinta Energy and was commissioned in 1985. Northern received coal by rail from the Leigh Creek Coal Mine, 280 km to the north. The plant ceased electricity production in May 2016 and decommissioned and demolished over the following few years.
Clifty Creek Power Plant is a 1,300-MW coal-fired power station located in Madison, Indiana. Clifty Creek is operated by the Indiana Kentucky Electric Corporation. It is named after Clifty Creek, which enters the Ohio River nearby.
The Acid Rain Program is a market-based initiative taken by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in an effort to reduce overall atmospheric levels of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which cause acid rain. The program is an implementation of emissions trading that primarily targets coal-burning power plants, allowing them to buy and sell emission permits according to individual needs and costs. In 2011, the trading program that existed since 1995 was supplemented by four separate trading programs under the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR). On August 21, 2012, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued its Opinion and Order in the appeal of the Cross State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) for two independent legal reasons. The stay on CSAPR was lifted in October 2014, allowing implementation of the law and its trading programs to begin.
Centralia Coal Mine was an open-pit coal mine, owned by the Canadian-based TransAlta Corporation. The mine shut down in 2006. Also referred to as the TransAlta Centralia Mining (TCM) operation, the coal mine was located approximately 5 miles (8 km) northeast of the city of Centralia, in Lewis County, in the US state of Washington. Together with Centralia Power Plant, it was bought in May 2000 by TransAlta for $554 million – $101 million for the mine and $453 million for the power plant.
Coal combustion products (CCPs), also called coal combustion wastes (CCWs) or coal combustion residuals (CCRs), are categorized in four groups, each based on physical and chemical forms derived from coal combustion methods and emission controls:
A coal-fired power station or coal power plant is a thermal power station which burns coal to generate electricity. Worldwide there are over 2,400 coal-fired power stations, totaling over 2,000 gigawatts capacity. They generate about a third of the world's electricity, but cause many illnesses and the most early deaths, mainly from air pollution.
Coal generated about 19.5% of the electricity at utility-scale facilities in the United States in 2022, down from 38.6% in 2014 and 51% in 2001. In 2021, coal supplied 9.5 quadrillion British thermal units (2,800 TWh) of primary energy to electric power plants, which made up 90% of coal's contribution to U.S. energy supply. Utilities buy more than 90% of the coal consumed in the United States. There were over 200 coal powered units across the United States in 2022. Coal plants have been closing since the 2010s due to cheaper and cleaner natural gas and renewables. But environmentalists say that political action is needed to close them faster, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the United States to better limit climate change.
China is the largest producer and consumer of coal and the largest user of coal-generated electricity in the world. The share of coal in the Chinese energy mix declined to 55% in 2021 according to the US Energy Information Agency.
The Dickerson Generating Station is an 853 MW electric generating plant owned by NRG Energy, located approximately two miles west of Dickerson, Maryland, on the eastern banks of the Potomac River.
The Chalk Point Generating Station is an electricity-generating plant, comprising oil and natural gas fired units, owned by NRG Energy, located near the town of Eagle Harbor, Maryland, United States, on the Patuxent River.
The A. B. Brown Generating Station is a four-unit, 700 megawatt (MW) power plant, located on the northern bank of Ohio River, 8 miles (10 km) east of Mount Vernon, Indiana and 5 miles (8 km) southwest of Evansville, Indiana just west of the Posey-Vanderburgh County Line. Each of the two coal-fired units has a name-plate capacity of 265.2 MW. Bituminous coal is used as a primary fuel type, which can be substituted for natural gas. There are also two gas turbine units, 88.2 MW of nameplate capacity each. The facility is owned by Centerpoint Energy. Vectren announced a plan to retire the plant in 2023 and replace it with a natural gas power plant; however, this plan needs to be approved by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission.
The health and environmental impact of the coal industry includes issues such as land use, waste management, water and air pollution, caused by the coal mining, processing and the use of its products. In addition to atmospheric pollution, coal burning produces hundreds of millions of tons of solid waste products annually, including fly ash, bottom ash, and flue-gas desulfurization sludge, that contain mercury, uranium, thorium, arsenic, and other heavy metals. Coal is the largest contributor to the human-made increase of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere.
The Brandon Shores Generating Station is an electric generating station located on Fort Smallwood Road north of Orchard Beach in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, near Glen Burnie, and is operated by Raven Power Holdings, Inc. Brandon Shores consists of two Babcock & Wilcox coal-fired boilers and two General Electric steam turbines with a combined nominal generating capacity of 1370 MWe. Unit 1 went into operation in May 1984 and Unit 2 in May 1991.
Warrick Generating Station is a 755-MWe coal-fired electricity-generating station, located southeast of Newburgh in Warrick County. It sits on the north bank of Ohio River, downstream of the F. B. Culley Generating Station. The plant has four coal-fired, steam-powered turbines with a combined generating capacity of 791 MWe. Alcoa owns three of the four generating stations, which were placed into service in the early 1960s. The largest unit, known as Unit 4, is 323-MWe unit jointly owned by Alcoa and Vectren. This larger unit was placed in operation in 1970.
The Monticello Steam Electric Station was a 1.8-gigawatt coal-fired power plant located southwest of Mount Pleasant, Texas, in Titus County, Texas. It operated from 1974 to 2018.
Brunner Island Steam Electric Station is a coal-fired, alternatively natural gas-powered electrical generation facility in York County, Pennsylvania. It occupies most of the area of the eponymous island on Susquehanna River. The power plant has three major units, which came online in 1961, 1965, and 1969, with respective generating capacities of 334 MW, 390 MW, and 759 MW. In addition, three internal combustion generators were installed in 1967. Talen Energy will stop coal use at the plant in 2028.
Coal phase-out is an environmental policy intended to stop using the combustion of coal in coal-burning power plants, and is part of fossil fuel phase-out. Coal is the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel, therefore phasing it out is critical to limiting climate change and keeping global warming to 1.5 °C as laid out in the Paris Climate Agreement. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that coal is responsible for over 30% of the global average temperature increase above pre-industrial levels.
