JEA Power Plants in Jacksonville, Florida

Most of Jacksonville's electricity is made at four JEA power plant sites in the city, with the rest bought from solar fields, landfill gas facilities and a nuclear plant in Georgia.

The JEA Electric Facilities page states that JEA owns four power plant sites in Jacksonville and purchases power from several solar fields, landfill gas facilities and a nuclear plant. The JEA Electric Systems page describes JEA as the eighth largest municipally owned electric utility in the United States in terms of the number of customers, with a service area of approximately 900 square miles and more than 530,000 customers, covering most of Duval County and portions of Clay and St. Johns counties. The same page lists four generating plants, over 745 circuit miles of transmission lines and more than 7,200 miles of distribution lines. JEA's Generation Strategy page gives existing generation capacity as 3,747 MW.

JEA's power source disclosure on the Generation Strategy page shows how the Jacksonville mix has moved over three years, as a share of energy delivered:

The JEA footnote defines "other" as electricity from inter-regional interchange transactions that are not traceable to specific generation sources and other system purchases. The Jacksonville utility explains its taste for several fuels with history: the Electric Facilities page says that in the 1970s JEA produced electricity using just one type of fuel, oil, and that the 1973 oil embargo caused the price of oil per barrel to quadruple. JEA now runs a generation fleet using solid fuel, natural gas and some solar, biomass, biogas and nuclear, which it says lets it produce electricity based on economics.

Northside Generating Station is JEA's largest plant, producing more than 1,300 MW of peak capacity in north Jacksonville from three large steam units and four small diesel peaking units.

The JEA Northside page places the station in north Jacksonville in an environmentally sensitive area surrounded by wetlands, and lists its fuels as natural gas, fuel oil, biomass, coal and petroleum coke. Its units were built over more than a decade, as JEA dates them:

The 2000 repowering of Northside Units 1 and 2 used two of the largest circulating fluidized bed combustors in the world at the time, which JEA says were chosen to improve combustion efficiency, burn a wider range of fuels and add base load capacity. JEA credits in-cycle sulfur capture with limestone injection and a spray dryer absorber, plus low temperature operation that reduces NOx, and calls the units among the cleanest solid fuel plants in the world. Units 1 and 2 received Power Magazine's Top Plant Award in 2012 for ten years of continuous improvement. As of October 18, 2026, the Northside page still gives the Unit 3 retirement only as "after 2026", with no firmer date.

Brandy Branch, Kennedy and Greenland are JEA's natural gas plants in Jacksonville, each burning gas in General Electric combustion turbines with ultra low sulfur diesel as backup.

The JEA combustion turbine page places Brandy Branch Generating Station on the far Westside of Jacksonville near Baldwin, next door to a 100-acre solar farm. Brandy Branch was commissioned in 2001 with three 170 MW simple cycle combustion turbines, and in 2005 JEA converted two of them to a 2x1 combined cycle configuration, in which a steam turbine runs on waste heat from the gas turbines. It is JEA's only combined cycle facility. The JEA Electric Facilities page gives these site capacities:

The two JEA pages date the Kennedy site differently, and both statements stand: the Electric Facilities page says power for Jacksonville has been produced at the Kennedy site since 1912, while the combustion turbine page says Kennedy sits on the site of the Talleyrand Avenue Light Plant, the first large-scale electric generation facility ever built in Jacksonville, which opened in 1943. The two turbines in operation at Kennedy today were installed in 2000 and 2009.

Greenland Energy Center began operation in 2011 off Philips Highway, in the Florida 9A/9B connection corridor. JEA calls it its first new generation site south and east of the St. Johns River in more than 50 years, and says a future conversion to combined cycle would raise output. Kennedy and Greenland each have two General Electric 7FA, 170 MW combustion turbines fed by underground natural gas lines; both are unmanned and are started and monitored from a control room at Brandy Branch, which JEA calls its natural gas generation headquarters. One stale line remains on JEA's site: the combustion turbine page's sidebar still says JEA operates five power plant sites and has an ownership interest in a plant in Georgia, while the Electric Facilities page says four sites.

The coal-fired St. Johns River Power Park, which JEA co-owned with Florida Power and Light, was decommissioned in 2018 after the Florida Public Service Commission approved its early shutdown.

JEA's Generation Strategy page counts the decommissioning of St. Johns River Power Park Units 1 and 2 in 2018 and of Robert W. Scherer Unit 4 in 2022 as the steps that cut JEA's solid fuel use. The regulatory record sits with the state. The Florida Public Service Commission's Order No. PSC-2017-0415-AS-EI, issued October 24, 2017, in Docket No. 20170123-EI, records that on May 22, 2017, Florida Power and Light petitioned the Commission to approve as prudent the early shutdown of the Power Park and the early termination of its Joint Operating Agreement with co-owner JEA.

The order approved a settlement between Florida Power and Light and the Office of Public Counsel after a hearing scheduled for September 25, 2017. Its accounting terms include a $90.4 million payment from Florida Power and Light to JEA, and the Commission found that the agreement would allow customers to receive projected savings of $183 million in cumulative present value revenue requirements and the improved emissions profile of an early shutdown, expected in 2018. Coal that once fueled the Jacksonville plant appears in the order only as fuel inventory and rail car delivery disputes to be settled at shutdown.

JEA does not own Plant Vogtle; it buys 200 MW of nuclear power from the Georgia plant through the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia under a 20-year arrangement.

The JEA Electric Facilities page states that JEA is purchasing 200 MW of power from the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, MEAG Power, from the nuclear facility at Plant Vogtle, and that JEA does not own the facility but is purchasing power from it for 20 years. The JEA Plant Vogtle page sets out the history, which Jacksonville customers have been paying for since 2016:

JEA states that Units 3 and 4 were first expected in April 2016 and April 2017, and that its 2018 complaint sought to clarify the validity of the amended agreement, which was never approved by the Jacksonville City Council. JEA is paying MEAG Power approximately $221 million annually from 2024 through 2044, and JEA's power source disclosure shows nuclear rising from 3 percent of energy in 2023 to 12 percent in 2025.

JEA began as a City of Jacksonville electric department in 1895 and now adds solar mostly by buying the output of farms built by others.

The JEA history page states that the City of Jacksonville established the utility in 1895, that it grew from a department of city government into an independent authority created by the consolidation of city and county governments in 1967, and that on June 1, 1997, the water and sewer systems the city had operated since 1880 became part of JEA. The page ties that merger to the Main Street Light Plant at the city's Waterworks Park at First and Main streets.

The JEA Solar Energy Centers page lists the solar sites that feed the Jacksonville grid:

Jacksonville Solar is owned by PSEG Solar Source LLC, has approximately 200,000 panels on a 100 acre site, and JEA receives all of its electricity and renewable energy credits for a 30-year term. The SunPort battery is the first utility scale battery system on the JEA grid. JEA's Generation Strategy page adds that JEA added 150 MW of solar through a purchased power agreement in 2023 and will welcome 125 MW of solar and 50 MW of battery energy storage by the end of 2026. Last verified: October 18, 2026, against eight JEA pages (Electric Systems, Electric Facilities, Northside, combustion turbines, solar, Generation Strategy, Plant Vogtle and history) and the Florida Public Service Commission's 2017 Power Park order.