JEA Taking Electric Unit Offline

2014-07-15

Jacksonville, FL - Today at the monthly board meeting, JEA announced that it is taking Northside Unit 3 offline and placing it into reserve storage in December 2015, approximately four years ahead of its retirement schedule. Northside Unit 3 (NS3) is one of three units at JEA’s Northside Generating Station.

“Our customers have reduced their energy use, making it possible for JEA to reduce its fleet without impacting power quality or reliability,” said JEA CEO and Managing Director Paul McElroy. “JEA is committed to providing environmentally responsible and cost-effective electricity to our customers and community.”

“JEA’s leadership recognized the opportunity to be proactive in removing a less efficient system that would require significant resources to satisfy ever-changing regulatory requirements and ongoing maintenance,” explained Mike Hightower, JEA board chairman. “JEA has plenty of generating capacity to meet current and future customer needs for electricity.”

JEA is making strategic decisions to adjust the business to the changing electric industry market conditions. JEA continues to make significant progress in optimizing its fleet and has been planning for more environmentally friendly production capacity. New environmental regulatory requirements make this a wise, long term decision for the future.

For the past 37 years, we have all benefitted from NS3 and the employees who made it a safe, reliable facility and valuable community resource. NS3 has served the Jacksonville community well since 1977. At 535 megawatts, it was the largest generating unit in the fleet at that time and was built to burn residual oil. To date NS3 has produced more than 46,500,000 megawatt hours, enough energy to power the entire city for four years.

Staffing reductions that result from retiring NS3  will be achieved through attrition.

JEA operates five power plant sites in Jacksonville, has an ownership interest in a power plant in Georgia, and purchases power locally from a solar field and a landfill gas facility. JEA has a system installed capacity of 3,769 megawatts.

JEA is the seventh-largest community-owned electric utility in the United States and one of the largest water and sewer utilities in the nation providing electric, water and sewer service to residents and businesses in northeast Florida.

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• board
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