Like something from the 19th century…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Big Allis from the Roosevelt Avenue bridge on a cold and humid day, belching Dickensian clouds of steam out over the East River.
from wikipedia
Big Allis, formally known as Ravenswood No. 3, is a giant electric power generator originally commissioned by Consolidated Edison Company (ConEd) and built by the Allis-Chalmers Corporation in 1965. Currently owned by Transcanada Corp., it is located on 36th Avenue and Vernon Boulevard in western Queens, New York.
During 1963, Allis-Chalmers announced that ConEd had ordered the “world’s first MILLION-KILOWATT unit…big enough to serve 3,000,000 people.” This sheer scale helped the plant become popularly known as “Big Allis”.
At the time of its installation, it was the world’s largest energy generating facility. It is located on the Ravenswood site, consisting of Units 1, 2, 3 and 4, as well as several small Gas Turbines (GTs), and an oil farm. The site overall produces about 2,000 MW, or approximately 16% of New York City’s current energy needs. The current installed capacity of Big Allis is around 980 MW.
The Ravenswood, Queens site also includes a steam generation plant consisting of four B&W boilers, commonly known as “The A House”, owned by Con Edison but run by employees of Transcanada. It helps in the supply of steam to Manhattan.
The Newtown Pentacle 
[…] it is emitting is actually waste steam generated from CONED‘s consolidated generating system at Big Allis, and it is included in this post purely for the extreme altitude of its projection, which- to my […]
hovering above « The Newtown Pentacle
January 27, 2011 at 12:15 am