Questions About Electricity...
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Question: How much electricity does a typical American home use?
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Question: How is electricity consumed in U.S. homes?
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Question: How many coal-fired power plants are there in the U.S.?
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In 2006, there were 616 facilities with 1,493 individual generators1 that used coal as the predominant fuel2 source for generating electricity. |
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503 are "power plants" owned by electric utilities and independent power producers that generate and sell electricity as their primary business. |
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The other 113 are at industrial, commercial, government, and institutional sites that use most or all of the electricity generated on-site. |
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More: Generating Units in the United States, 2006 |
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1 Although the facilities had at least one coal-fired generator, some facilities generated more electricity using other fuels.
2 Predominant fuel source based on total energy (Btu) content. |
| Last updated: March 7, 2008 |
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Question: How much electricity does a typical nuclear power plant generate?
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In 2007, the “average” nuclear power plant generated about 12.4 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh). There were 65 nuclear power plants with 104 operating nuclear reactors that generated a total of 806.49 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or about 19% of the nation’s electricity.
Thirty-six of those plants had two or more reactors. The smallest nuclear plant has a single reactor with 476 MW of generation capacity and the largest has three reactors with a total of 3,825 MW of capacity.
The average plant capacity factor was 91.8 percent. |
| Learn More: Information and data on nuclear power reactors and Statistics about nuclear generated electricity (PDF). |
| Last updated: April 16, 2008 |
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