At 8 a m on Saturday 12 June Duke Energy marked the end of an era when 500 explosive charges were set off to demolish two power houses at the company’s Crystal River coal fired plant in Citrus County, Florida.
The 200 foot tall buildings contained boilers, steam turbine generators, drums, motors, pumps and pipes – the main
equipment needed to generate 915 MWe for more than 50 years. The same team will demolish the remaining two 500 foot tall stacks later this year. 100% of the steel, copper and other recovered metals, along with the concrete, will be recycled.
The two-unit coal plant was built in the 1960s and served Duke Energy’s 1.8 million customers in Florida for more than five decades, but it was retired in 2018 when the new state-of-the-art Citrus Combined 
Cycle station, a natural gas plant, started operations.
Duke Energy is in the process of retiring coal plants and replacing them with natural gas plants and renewables as part of the company’s clean energy transformation plan, which calls for reducing carbon dioxide emissions 50% by 2030 and achieving net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.
