WASHINGTON – A $16 billion gas-fired power facility is coming to Anderson County, placing one of the nation’s largest energy projects in rural East Texas.
Capacity: Up to 5.2 GW of natural gas-fired generation, capable of serving up to 5 GW of large-load demand.
Operator: NextEra Energy Resources.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is scheduled to arrive Thursday morning at the White House, kicking off a visit originally expected to focus on trade and strengthening the U.S.-Japanese alliance as China’s influence grows in Asia.
Boulevard Associates LLC, located in Juno Beach, Florida, recently recorded four three-year land purchase options covering about 1,085 acres in Anderson County located in these surveys:
“ESI’s core competencies include engineering services for power generation, utilities and oil & gas industries. Our prime focus is on steam and gas turbine driven power generation facilities. At ESI we leverage years of experience and common sense. Be it an outage, control system upgrade, performance uprate or full blown smart automation deployment we understand that ESI is not the only one around. We work with our technology providers, suppliers and use common sense.”
I’m fairly certain this will be the location of the power generation facility. It is close to the Bethel gas treatment plant and an Atmos facility.
The planned Anderson County facility is expected to produce 5.2 gigawatts of power. I asked grok (AI assistant) to identify how many plants in the US can produce at least 5 gigawatts.
"Only one power plant in the United States is capable of producing more than 5 gigawatts (GW) of power.
The Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state, a hydroelectric facility operated by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, has an installed nameplate capacity of approximately 6,809 MW (6.809 GW). This makes it the largest by capacity in the US.
From reliable sources like Wikipedia’s list of largest US power stations (based on recent data) and cross-referenced with EIA-related information:
Grand Coulee Dam: ~6,809 MW (hydroelectric).
The next largest facilities fall well below 5 GW, such as:
Vogtle Electric Generating Plant (nuclear, Georgia): ~4,536 MW.
Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station (Arizona): ~3,937 MW.
Other major plants (nuclear, gas, coal, etc.) top out around 3–4 GW.
No other operational power plant reaches or exceeds 5 GW. This is consistent across lists of the top US stations by installed capacity, where Grand Coulee stands alone above that threshold. Note that “capable of producing” here refers to nameplate/installed capacity (the maximum rated output), not actual generation, which varies by factors like water availability for hydro or capacity factors for nuclear/gas plants.
For context, the US has over 12,000 utility-scale power plants with total utility-scale capacity exceeding 1.3 TW (terawatts), but very few individual sites aggregate to multi-GW scales due to practical, environmental, and engineering limits. Large hydro dams like Grand Coulee are exceptional in this regard."
This highlights the scale of the facility planned for Anderson County!
