What’s happened to Georgia Power’s close-in-2002 Coal Plant Arkwright
that

Putnam County Manager Paul Van Houte used as a bad example?

According to

Georgia Power’s own online history:

In 2002, the company retired 11 generating units at three sites including
all of the units at Plant Atkinson and Plant Arkwright and two units at
Plant Mitchell.

Southern Company has online a

press release from 15 May 2002:

For more than 50 years, generating units at Plant Arkwright in
Macon, Plant Atkinson in Smyrna and Plant Mitchell in Albany have
been producing electricity reliably for Georgia Power customers.
Now, for economic reasons, 11 of those units — totaling 415
megawatts (mw) of capacity — are being proposed for retirement
at the end of this year.

Units proposed for retirement include: Plant Arkwright units 1
through 4, which are each 40 mw coal-fueled units, plus two 15-mw
natural gas combustion turbine (CT) units; Plant Atkinson units 2
through 4, which are each 60 mw coal units; and units 1 and 2 at
Plant Mitchell, which are 22.5 mw coal units. All of the units, with
the exception of the combustion turbines at Arkwright, began
commercial operation in the 1940s.

“This proposal is based on thorough economic analyses,”
said David Ratcliffe, president and CEO of Georgia Power.
“Since 1995, we have been required by the Georgia Public
Service Commission to conduct a unit retirement analysis as part of
the Integrated Resource Plan. When we did this analysis for our 2005
plan, the results indicated that it is more economical to retire
these 11 units than to continue to operate them.”

Georgia Power will include the plant retirement proposal as part of
an amended Integrated Resource Plan that will be filed with the PSC
in June. That plan will also include an adjusted demand forecast and
a proposal to certify new generation sources to meet the state’s
electricity needs in 2005….

Plant Arkwright will be dismantled following retirement. Plant
Atkinson will remain in place because it is on the same site as
Plant McDonough. Plant Mitchell still will operate a 125 mw steam
unit plus three combustion turbine units. The 220-acre Plant
Arkwright site on the Ocmulgee River north of Macon will be
evaluated for future use.

In this

picture posted by Scott Mosher 12 September 2007,
Plant Arkwright doesn’t look dismantled.
Maybe that picture was taken earlier, because the abstract of
Electric Power Research Institute’s 4 November 2004

Decommissioning Handbook for Coal-Fired Power Plants
says

At Arkwright, the plant was removed completely and the site no
longer used for generating electricity.

D.H. Griffin Companies

takes credit for demolishing Plant Arkwright, but doesn’t say when.
The site, however, appears to still be
fenced off, vacant, and
not reused for anything, going by

Google Street View:

View Larger Map

How much job security is anyone deriving from a vacant coal plant site?
Sure looks like a good location for some solar panels….

-jsq