In 1914, the plant continued its innovation by replacing the vertical-shaft turbines with horizontal-shaft turbines. It was designated a national engineering landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1975.
The state-of-art before this unit was a 0.6MW unit by GE and a 1.5MW unit by Westinghouse. The 1894 16,200-kilowatt Harrison Street Station that used reciprocating engine units was overloaded in less than 6 years.The original 5MW (million watts) steam-turbine generating unit ordered for Fisk was such a significant advance in capacity that when it was retired it was returned to GE's headquarters in Schenectady, New York, to be preserved. The demand for electricity from Samuel Insull's Chicago Edison Company (see below, HAER says Commonwealth Electric Company) was growing so fast that Insull pushed GE it increase the size of the generators. : Jan 6, 2906 and May 16, 1908įisk went into service Octoand closed 2014. That plant has not only been closed, it has been torn down.) NRG now owns these plants.) (I wonder if it owned State Line as well. (Update: It should be no surprise that Midwest Generation went bankrupt rather soon after it closed some of its plants. I wonder if they added scrubbers soon before they closed them. But I read something on the company's web site that bragged about them recently adding pollution controls. It indicates that mercury emissions is the pollution issue. The Chicago Tribune also has an article on the closing of the two Chicago plants. The article also indicates that Fisk, Crawford, and two of the four stacks of the Will County plant were shutdown in 2012. According to Romeville Patch, none of the plants have scrubbers because they were grandfathered with respect to the Clean Air Act when Midwestern Generation bought all of ComEd's coal-fired plants in 1999.
Even if it did have scrubbers, it may soon become history because the coal (and nuclear) plants are having a hard time competing with gas-fired plants because of the increase in supply of natural gas caused by horizontal drilling and fracking. But I was not aware of this plant, so I did not know if it had scrubbers. I knew that the Fisk and Crawford plants did not have scrubbers and would be shutdown. Below are several pictures I took of the Will County plant because it is next to 135th street in Romeoville.
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