With demand for electricity soaring, Arkansas utilities are looking everywhere for new generation possibilities, including up in the air.
Entergy Arkansas and the Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp. both recently put major power plant plans before state regulators, and both have connected new solar farms within the last 10 months. Entergy’s 200-megawatt Flat Fork Solar came online just last month.
But AECC also thought outside the box — or, rather, inside — to create 100 new megawatts of capacity at its Fitzhugh Generating Station.
It added two large turbines derived from the aerospace industry to increase the natural gas plant’s output from 170 to 270 megawatts.
“If you’ve ever taken a transatlantic flight, those large Boeing jetliners typically have very large engines,” AECC President and CEO Vernon “Buddy” Hasten said in an interview. “That engine hanging off the wing is made for the aerospace industry. If you take that same engine and use it to make electricity, it’s called an aero derivative.”
It was a crucial addition at a time when grid operators are requiring more excess generation capacity, new power-guzzling data centers are coming in and two giant coal-burning plants that Entergy and the cooperative co-own are set to either shut down or shift to other fuels.
“We basically took a 747 and tied it to the ground and turned it on and made electricity,” Hasten joked about the Fitzhugh expansion. “Actually, they are engines that General Electric has configured to make electricity. It was sort of like buying a power plant in a box.
“As a co-op, we’re always looking for bargains, and this was a good deal,” he said. “Maybe someone else couldn’t meet their obligations. The seller was really looking to sell.”
The utility further saved money by installing the big transformer from its decommissioned Carl E. Bailey gas-fired plant near Augusta to connect the new aero-derivative power to the grid.
The Bailey property is also the site of a 122-megawatt solar plant that AECC commissioned at the end of last year.
The co-op’s next generation proposal is an $800 million simple-cycle 850-megawatt gas power plant in Texas near Texarkana. Entergy also has gas-burning plants on the drawing board, including a 754-megawatt combined cycle combustion turbine near the White Bluff generating facility, to be called the Jefferson Power Station.
Entergy settled a Clean Air Act lawsuit by the Sierra Club by agreeing to stop burning coal at the White Bluff plant near Redfield by 2028. Under the 2018 consent decree, it will also stop burning coal at its Independence Station in Newark in 2030. Together, Independence and White Bluff supply Entergy, AECC and municipal utilities with a combined 3,500 megawatts of electricity.
That’s more than one-fifth of Arkansas’ net summer capacity of 15,000 megawatts as of 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Under a plan outlined to lawmakers and municipal utility leaders in Jonesboro and Conway, the Independence plant will continue generating electricity by converting to burning gas. The new facility will be majority-owned by AECC, which owns 35% of the current plant.
The city of Jonesboro would own 15% of the new operation, and Conway and West Memphis would have smaller stakes. The White Bluff plant would stay under Entergy’s primary ownership, and the utility is considering converting it to burn natural gas.
AECC hasn’t confirmed that the Independence plant will turn to natural gas. Spokesman Rob Roedel said that details “on the replacement generation source” are not available.
But Hasten explained that natural gas was basically the only choice for building a new baseload power plant quickly, like the one he’s planning near Naples, Texas.
“As you look at our integrated resource plan, it looks that way,” Hasten said in a witty 35-minute interview. Coal-burning plants are not being built today, he said, and new nuclear plants are at least 10 to 15 years away from feasibility. That’s why the power plant in Texas will burn gas.
“I get asked all the time. ‘Why Texas?’ Well, if you were a rancher, you’d be looking for good grass, good water, natural protection against predators,” he said. “The ideal location for this power plant is someplace with proximity to a natural gas pipeline, proximity to high-voltage power lines, and not right in the middle of an urban area. … We looked at many sites, and the Texas location is by far the most cost effective.”
It’s also in the footprint of Southwest Power Pool, a regional transmission organization whose market is requiring more accredited capacity from AECC.
2 Entergy Plants
Kristin Dalrymple, who became Entergy Arkansas’ vice president for business operations in March, offered some historical context to today’s resource planning crunch.
“The last time Entergy Arkansas really built units was when we built our coal units in the early 1980s and when we built Arkansas Nuclear One,” she said. “About 20 or 30 years after that, in a period when we needed new generation, we were able to acquire existing units.
“So now we are again in a period where there’s additional growth, but there’s also a backdrop where we’ve entered a consent decree to cease burning coal. So beyond our growth strategy, we have a replacement strategy to replace generation at White Bluff,” Dalrymple continued. “If you look at our last Integrated Resource Plan filing … you will see that we had a preferred resource plan that included a number of resources, and it also acknowledged that we were expecting to see growth.”
Earlier this year, Entergy won approval for a new natural gas plant to replace Lake Catherine Unit 4, which will close in 2027 after 50 years of service. The new 446-megawatt facility will bolster Entergy’s reliability and support load growth across its 730,000-customer footprint, the company said. It could begin operations in 2028.
Designated as Ironwood CT, it would be a simple cycle combustion turbine. Unlike the Jefferson design, it will not use combined cycle technology, which creates extra power by turning a turbine first by burning gas and then by using the exhaust to heat steam to spin a second turbine.
“In that filing for Jefferson Power Station, we talked about the benefits of combined cycle capacity to serve customer needs,” Dalrymple said. “It has an excellent load-following capability, and it’s an energy-efficient source of power.
“That doesn’t mean that we are necessarily shutting down the White Bluff units altogether. We are also evaluating potentially extending the lives of those units by converting them to burn natural gas.”
Taking a Hard Look
Arkansas utilities release formal resource planning documents every three years. Entergy’s integrated resource report came out about a year ago, and AECC submitted its plan in February.
The reports are complex, often running hundreds of pages, but they lay out how public utilities plan to allot resources to ensure reliability and stable costs to customers.
Entergy Arkansas’ plans drew recent scrutiny from the Arkansas Public Service Commission staff, the Arkansas attorney general’s office and industry groups like the Southern Renewable Energy Association and the Arkansas Advanced Energy Association.
The core concern is that the Jefferson Power Station doesn’t meet requirements to be paid for as it’s being built under the Generating Arkansas Jobs Act of 2025.
The JPS project is the first in the state to be proposed under the act, which lets utilities apply a “construction work in progress” (CWIP) process to have ratepayers shoulder costs as construction goes along. Previously, ratepayers would foot the bill after new plants started operating.
Utilities argue, with some justification, that the CWIP process can save consumer money by reducing financing costs. But the new Arkansas law requires that new projects be tied to strategic investments to attract significant new economic development.
Arkansas PSC resource planning guidelines require utilities to ensure that any new generation projects serve the public interest and generally represent the lowest cost to ratepayers, though there are exceptions. Entergy calculated that the Jefferson Power Station will increase average residential non-fuel charges on electric bills by $2.85 per month.
Lauren Waldrip, director of the Arkansas Advanced Energy Association, said Entergy was trying to use the new process to pay for a plant that has “been in the works for some time” without justifying the switch from the traditional regulatory review timeline. “There are other concerns, one of which is that there’s no customer protection,” Waldrip said.
Entergy Arkansas is asking for retail customers to bear 100% of the JPS costs. “The PSC staff points out that for the project they’re seeking to have approved, the costs are unknown, and that the utility didn’t provide any benchmark against comparable projects. And the attorney general’s office filing says that Jefferson Power Station will drive significant ratepayer impact,” Waldrip said.
Simon Mahan, executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, wrote in PSC filings that JPS does not meet the law’s definition of a strategic investment, and that it isn’t being proposed to serve a new large power user like a data center.
“[Entergy Arkansas] has known about the retirement of White Bluff for almost a decade, and has effectively waited until the last minute to announce public plans,” Mahan wrote.
Entergy spokesman Matt Ramsey said on Sept. 23 that the utility believes that the attorney general’s office and the PSC general staff actually support plans to build the Jefferson station. “All they were asking for is additional information, which we provided as of last Friday. This is part of the normal regulatory process, which is a key component that other media outlets might have missed.”
More than 25 state officials have written letters of support for JPS to the PSC.
“The governor, the General Assembly, the Department of Commerce and economic professionals from across the state have all said the same thing: Arkansas needs more electrical power to compete,” Ramsey said. “We are enabling the state’s vision to be an economic leader by investing in these resources.”
He pointed out that energy consultant Scott Norwood, who testified on behalf of the AG’s office, found that Entergy had demonstrated that it needs the power the JPS would generate, despite noting some “deficiencies” in the application.
Whatever happens in the JPS docket, Waldrip said regulators must keep consumers in mind.
“At the end of the day, we know that energy prices are going up,” she said. “We’re not naive, but we want to continue to make sure that mechanisms are in place to put some downward pressure on costs.”
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