The power plants of Washington County, Ohio

The above aerial photo of the Duke Energy Washington power plant was taken shortly before I arrived in
March 2002. The plant is a couple of miles north of Beverly. This view is looking northeast; the structure
to the west of the units is the prefabricated penthouse which was shortly to be installed on top of #1 HRSG.

In April 2004 I passed through the area to have a look at the finished products. Here is the permanent Duke Energy sign at the entrance. Heading up the driveway, past the grassy areas that used to be parking and laydown. The warehouse tent was retained by the permanent plant. At the gate there was a guard sitting at an unsheltered office desk in the middle of the driveway. I asked him if the plant had operated lately and he said he'd only been working there for two days. Anyway, he let me take a couple of pictures. This view looks straight in, the construction office trailers used to be on the right side of the road. To the left of the parked vehicles are the admin building/control room and the permanent warehouse. Note that there is a second tent in the background. To the left of the warehouse are the chiller modules, which I was rather significantly involved in Duke sold this plant to Dynegy in 2014 (Duke Energy press release and Dynegy press release). A few miles southwest of the Duke Energy plant is the Waterford plant which Duke/Fluor Daniel built for PSEG. This plant was a less common configuration at the time for combined-cycle plants, a "3 on 1" (three gas turbines and one steam turbine) rated at 850 MW. The design included an alternate exhaust stack location so the plant could be operated as a 350 MW simple-cycle unit before the HRSG's and steam systems were completed. Except for testing, the plant was never utilized in this configuration. In this aerial view you can see the Muskingum River on the west side of the plant, and one of the township roads which cuts between the power block and the cooling tower/switchyard. There were several miles of narrow winding road from the highway to the plant, and the project had to mitigate traffic and then repave the road after construction was complete. This photo was taken sometime in the fall or winter of 2002-03 when most of the construction trailers were still in place and the penthouse structures were being completed. This photo was on then-owner PSEG's website. In 2005, PSEG sold this plant as well as the one in Lawerenceburg, IN, to AEP (2005 AEP press release). And more recently in 2016, AEP is in the process of selling these plants and 2 others to a new joint venture (AEP press release). Here is another aerial photo from Fluor Constructors with a few more details about the plant. A larger view looking southeast as you approach the plant. This view looks northeast at the unit 1 HRSG (a fuel gas heater is in the foreground). I visited this plant once while it was under construction while I was working at the Washington plant. The client here was PSEG, the same as at Lawrenceburg, so it shared some of the design features, and some of the folks I worked with at Lawrenceburg had been here earlier. The HRSG's here were built by Nooter/Eriksen so they have a somewhat different shape and penthouse configuration than the Alstom or Aalborg units I've worked on. I took all of these photos (except the aerials) in April 2004.