Willow Island West Virginia
Allegheny Energy's Pleasants Power Station on Willow Island
One Power Station Boulevard, State Route Two, Willow island West Virginia 26134
This plant burns light fluffy hot-burning West Virginia and Ohio coal brought in by river barges. The electricity is shipped out in wires to users on the grid.
The EPA required cooling towers which turned out to have a tremendous cost in Human life. A scaffolding failure during the construction of the number two cooling tower killed all of the workers at the 168 foot level of the 430 foot concrete cooling tower. Many workers were buried within sight of the tower in local cemeteries. In all 51 men died instantly in the Thursday, April 27, 1978, tragedy. It is the second-worst construction accident on record in North America, and carries grim echoes of the worst accident, the collapse of the Quebec Bridge on August 29, 1907, which killed 96 men.
Always be mindful when you turn on a light switch that many men and women work together to make this possible. It takes investors willing to risk capitol and construction workers who may be doing risky work in the safest way we know to devise.
NOTE
Since search engines find this page before all of the pages of legal wrangling over power generation the following information is for students researching the plant.
Willow Island has two power plants. The larger one with the tall stacks and two cooling towers is the Pleasants plant named after the West Virginia County in which it is located. has 1300 MW (millions of watts) of supercritical steam generating capacity. Supercritical means that the water is heated without boiling to a high temperature and fed to the generator where the steam> weighing almost as much as water expands to drive the high pressure section of the turbine. Typically the steam is reheated in the boiler and then sent to the low pressure section of the turbine. Most coal fired turbine generators of this size operate at 3,600 RPM.The plant is listed on the company
web site as having 243 MW of non-supercritical capacity. This may be
the coal/biomass unit you can find on the web. It may not run at a high
enough temperature to generate supercritical steam. Here the turbine
may operate at 1,800 RPM which is also typical of atomic plants which do
not achieve a high enough temperature to make supercritical
steam.
Thus the plant has a capacity of 1,533
MW. Our home is all electric with a ground water heating and cooling
system. Our monthly consumption will vary from 2,000 KWH to 1,500 KWH
per month. Non electric households using gas for heating and cooking
will use less current.
If we assume that there are 720 hours in a 30 day month at 2 KW per hour a home would consume 1,440 KWH of electricity at 2 KWH per hour. This appears to work out to 766,500 homes and twice that many or more people served You might ask an instructor or fellow student to check my figures. If I can be at all helpful let me know. So much of what you find in net searches is related to litigation and environmental complaints. For more information contact the utility company.
http://www.alleghenyenergy.com/
This Photograph is copyrighted by the photographer and from the collection of David Alkire Smith. It was taken with a digital camera on December 31, 2004 from the cab of the tractor of a semi rig hauling hazardous casing head gasoline. The photo was taken from the passenger's seat at normal highway speed just as dawn was breaking. Some folks call a decent photo taken this way a "road kill" picture. If you use this photo for desktop wallpaper, please keep in mind the cost of energy in human lives in addition to environmental concerns.
Enough “thermal pollution” to keep the Ohio River from freezing in the winter is desirable to permit winter barge and ferry traffic. In addition, avoiding ice jams during the spring thaw avoids property damage. If we had 10 to 20% of the thermal energy wasted here injected into the River Raisin in the winter, our ice jam and flooding problems caused by ice would be a memory. Without some thermal pollution, the ice jam problem would return. That is exactly what has happened on United States Rivers where environmentally sensitive people lacking practical knowledge have their way and impose such cooling towers on existing plants.
More on the tragedy at number two tower April 27, 1978.
Click Here To Send E-Mail To Dave Smith - all comments are welcome