Prairie State Generating Company (PSGC) is the operating company of the Prairie State Energy Campus (PSEC), a stand-alone technologically advanced energy facility located in Washington County, Illinois, approximately 60 miles southeast of St. Louis, Missouri. The energy campus is comprised of a supercritical coal-fired power plant and an adjacent underground coal mine which provides all of the fuel for the power plant. The power plant came online in 2012, with Unit 1 commencing commercial operations in June and Unit 2 in November of that year. The power plant consists of two units with a nameplate capacity of approximately 816 MW each.

PSEC is wholly owned by not-for-profit utilities that are committed to providing clean, reliable, and affordable baseload electricity to 2.5 million families in hundreds of communities across eight states in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions.

Prairie State is proud to provide economic prosperity for hardworking men and women in communities across downstate Illinois. PSGC supports more than 650 well-paying, full-time jobs, contributing more than $785 million a year to the state’s economy. In addition, Prairie State utilizes the skills of more than 1,000 boilermakers, pipefitters, millwrights, iron workers, electricians, laborers, operators, and carpenters to perform maintenance work at the power plant – a $45 million annual investment in the regional union workforce.

2023 Operational Performance

Below are the operating statistics of the PSEC power plant and coal mine for the year 2023.

  • Net Generation: 12,484,212 Net MWhs
  • Equivalent Availability Factor: 89.3%
  • Net Capacity Factor: 87.3%
  • Equivalent Forced Outage Rate: 5.6%
  • Total Tons of Coal Mined: 6,711,708 Tons
  • Mining Efficiency: 9.1 Tons Per Underground Labor Hour

PSEC’s sustainability statistics for 2023 can be found on this page: Environment.

Net Capacity Factor

Prairie State’s reliability is something that can be shown by its Net Capacity Factor (NCF). The graph below uses benchmark data from S&P Global to show the 3-year average performance of units over the years 2021-2023. This data accounted for 268 coal-fueled steam turbine units located in the United States with gross generation in 2023 of at least one million megawatt hours. As you can see, Prairie State’s two units performed in the top 10 for average NCF.

Data from S&P Global.

Environmental Compliance & Reporting

Prairie State operates under strict regulatory standards and is dedicated to environmental compliance. Our power plant is equipped with a continuous emissions monitoring system, which is staffed 24/7, 365 days a year.

Prairie State submits monthly, quarterly, and annual environmental compliance reporting data to the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Data from these reports is compiled by EPA and publicly available at the Clean Air Markets Program Data (CAMPD) website.

Replacing a Bus With Many Cars

A premature shutdown of Prairie State would be comparable to taking a bus out of service because it creates more emissions than a car. People would still need transportation, so they would be forced to drive many cars to make up for the lack of a bus. Thus the effort of removing one large source of transportation (or generation) leads to many sources, which will emit more in the end.

Prairie State is one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the country, generating over 12 million MWh in 2023 alone. The chart below uses data from CAMPD to show a comparison of Prairie State’s generation and emissions, to other grouped units with similar generation statistics. As you can see, Prairie State’s overall emissions profile is better, despite having produced similar amounts of electricity.

Total Emission Tons in the above chart include SO2, NOx, and CO2. Groups 1-6 compare PSGC with 68 of the lowest generating facilities. They are grouped from smallest to largest by the number of facilities needed to arrive at an aggregate total MWh production similar to PSGC. *Group 7 is comprised of the highest emitting facilities with an aggregate total MWh production similar to PSGC.

Data from EPA Clean Air Markets Program Data (CAMPD).