Ferguson plant project sees first foundations

November 01, 2012, 11:00 pm by Alexandria Randolph

The Ferguson Replacement Plant on Ferguson Rd. in Horseshoe Bay is scheduled for completion in 2014.

According to Lower Colorado River Authority officials, a continuous string of mixing trucks brought a steady pour of concrete at the Ferguson site on Tuesday and Thursday from 2 a.m. to the late morning. The concrete foundation installed Tuesday will support one of the plant’s two new heat recovery system generators, and the second installed on Thursday will support one of two gas turbine generators.

These are two of four concrete pours that are scheduled for the next two weeks. The total concrete used would be enough to fill one and a half Olympic-sized swimming pools, officials said.

The Ferguson Replacement Plant is a combined-cycle gas power plant that uses heat-recovery steam generators to efficiently use heat that would otherwise be wasted as a byproduct of generating electricity. Combined-cycle gas power plants like this one use natural gas with turbines to generate electricity and then use the steam byproduct to generate additional power.

For more on this story, see Friday's Highlander.