Vanderbilt Steam Plant

Vanderbilt Steam Plant is a coal-fired power station owned and operated by Vanderbilt University on the Vanderbilt campus in Nashville, Tennessee.

Vanderbilt's coal plant has three boilers. The plant produces electricity and provides heating and cooling to 5.8 million square feet of campus facilities. The plant receives its coal from eastern Kentucky. Vanderbilt sells fly ash from the plant to a mulch company. In the summer of 2009, Vanderbilt started sending its coal as to a landfill. The plant produces about a quarter of the electricity Vanderbilt consumes, with the remainder coming from Nashville Electric Service, which buys its power from the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The Sierra Club launched a campaign in September 2009, targeting about 60 college campuses nationwide, including Vanderbilt, that have coal plants. Despite the campaign, a university official said there were no plans to switch away from coal, "because it's such a huge part of our infrastructure at this point."

Plant Data

 * Owner/Parent Entity: Vanderbilt University
 * Plant Nameplate Capacity: 11.0 MW (Megawatts)
 * Units and In-Service Dates: 6.5 MW (1988), 4.5 MW (1989)
 * Location: Bryan Building, 24th Ave. South, Nashville, TN 37232
 * GPS Coordinates: 36.145556, -86.803844
 * Electricity Production: 40,514 MWh (2005)
 * Coal Consumption:
 * Coal Source: Kentucky
 * Number of Employees:

Emissions Data

 * CO2 Emissions:
 * SO2 Emissions:
 * SO2 Emissions per MWh:
 * NOx Emissions:
 * Mercury Emissions:

External Resources

 * Existing Electric Generating Units in the United States, 2005, Energy Information Administration, accessed Jan. 2009.
 * Environmental Integrity Project, "Dirty Kilowatts: America’s Most Polluting Power Plants", July 2007.
 * Facility Registry System, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, accessed Jan. 2009.
 * Carbon Monitoring for Action database, accessed Feb. 2009.
 * NETL Coal Power Plant Database, National Energy Technology Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy, 2007.
 * AirData Query Database, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, accessed April 2009.

Related SourceWatch Articles

 * Campus coal plants
 * Existing U.S. Coal Plants
 * Tennessee and coal
 * United States and coal
 * Global warming