Other Power Plants

As much as we like dams, and the ultimate in renewable energy production, we have to realize that hydro power supplies a very small percentage of the power we require. Even TVA, known for damming and controlling the Tennessee River, produce less than 10% of their power with hydro.

There are some interesting experiments with other energy sources, like solar, wind, geothermal, and suchlike, but lets get real: the output of a lot of these projects is measured in a few megawatts. Enough to run a few hundred homes, maybe, but not even close to our industrial and manufacturing requirements. The people that think wind or solar will do anything for us here in the Southeast are kidding themselves. I doubt that wind or solar could even generate enough power to manufacture and recycle the batteries that they require to operate. (We are NOT saying that these experiments should be abandoned, by any means!)

So, to generate baseload power in meaningful quantities, 500 to 1000 Megawatts, you currently have two choices, Coal or Nuclear. Gas Turbines are nice and reasonably clean, and are great for peakload plants. We couldn't afford the electricity they produced if we tried to use them for baseloads. So you are back to the two.

Personally, we like nukes. But, unfortunately, a largely misinformed public does not. So we still have a plethora of coal plants supplying the largest percentage of the elctricity we demand. The utilities, whether investor-owned like Southern Company (whom we have a small stake in), or government-owned like TVA, have huge capital investments in coal plants and the infrastructure to keep them fed with an endless stream of coal.

We are not going to throw rocks at the utilities for continuing to burn coal. They have no choice. The best we can hope to do is to educate the public about the advantages of nuclear power, and maybe help foster the idea that we need to stop burning fossil fuels for power production (or anything else). Then, maybe the utilities will find a climate where they can begin to consider the costs of phasing out fossil fueled power production.

In the meantime, there is no denying that these huge power plants are engineering beauties! So, on this page, we will present the coal, nuclear, or gas-fired plants we have collected. Maybe even some of the alternately fueled plants, if we ever find any!

Coal-fired Plants

Georgia Power's Plant Bowen Georgia Power's Plant Branch TVA's Gallatin Plant

Nuclear Plants

TVA's Watts Bar Nuclear Plant TVA's Sequoyah Nuclear Plant TVA's Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant

Close, but no cigar!

TVA's Bellefonte Development TVA's Hartsville Development