Big Blue: Vero Beach's Riverfront Power Plant — Vero Beach, Florida

Big Blue is the nickname for the City of Vero Beach's old municipal power plant, the tall aqua blue building on the Indian River Lagoon at the western base of the Alma Lee Loy Bridge on 17th Street. Vero News describes it as a 158-megawatt generating plant constructed in the early 1960s, with the first General Electric unit going online in November 1961. It replaced the city's older diesel plant near the railroad tracks as the main source of Vero's electricity.

The Indian River Guardian recorded the reasoning Vero leaders gave in 1961 for staying in the power business: electric utilities are monopolies by nature and should remain under the control of the people. Big Blue became the physical symbol of that choice. Its height is part of its identity: WPTV reported in early 2020 that its 60-foot roof exceeds the city's 50-foot height limit.

By its last decade Big Blue ran mostly as a backup. In December 2010, Vero News counted five General Electric generators at the plant, three of them more recent and more fuel-efficient purchases. The Indian River Guardian reported in October 2015 that the Vero plant sat idle except on the hottest and coldest days of the year, when the power used by the 34,000 customers of Vero Electric exceeded the transmission capacity into the city and the generators were fired up to meet the peak.

Standing by was costly. The Indian River Guardian reported that Big Blue had to be staffed twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, and that the City of Vero Beach had spent $2 million the previous year refurbishing one of its five generators. Because the plant ran so rarely, the small amount of power it produced cost far more than the peaking power Vero could buy under contract. In November 2015 the plant had 20 employees, ten of them eligible for retirement, according to the Guardian.

The shutdown followed a revised wholesale power contract between Vero Beach and the Orlando Utilities Commission in 2015. The Guardian reported in October 2015 that city officials expected closing Big Blue to save $4 million a year in operating costs, as part of projected savings of about $52 million through the end of 2023. City Manager Jim O'Connor said at the time that decommissioning might not mean demolition soon: fuel tanks and piping could go and buyers could be found for the generators and cooling towers, while the building and foundation would likely stay as the community decided how to use the land.

The end came in early November 2015, when O'Connor announced that the Orlando Utilities Commission had told the city its plant would no longer be called on to generate power. The Guardian marked it as 96 years after Vero bought a privately run plant downtown near the railroad tracks, and wrote that the city was now out of the power generation business. Five years earlier, Florida Power and Light had told Vero council members it neither wanted nor needed to buy the antiquated plant if it purchased Vero Electric, which meant any sale would leave Big Blue for the city to decommission.

The first structures to come down were the cooling towers. Vero News reported on June 11, 2016, that Vero Beach based South Bay Construction would dismantle the towers in the southeast quadrant of the plant property for $58,000, keeping the plant components to sell for reuse or scrap; had the city kept the parts, the job would have been billed at nearly $200,000. The City Council was also asked to approve a $396,000 contract to clean asbestos and mercury from the aging Big Blue buildings ahead of further demolition, and a city memo described the goal as creating green space for future use.

Bringing down the whole plant was a different matter. The same Vero News report noted that the main building encases an integrated substation and switching equipment, so it cannot be completely demolished without a new home for that equipment. The Indian River Guardian reported that O'Connor projected a cost of $1.6 million over two fiscal years to bring down Big Blue, and that the city had no plans to move the substation at 17th Street and Indian River Drive.

Attitudes toward Big Blue shifted once the plant was quiet. Vero News reported in December 2019 that the plant was abandoned roughly a year after Florida Power and Light bought the city's electric system for $185 million, and that members of the new Centennial Place steering committee were struck by the building on a tour. Planner Andres Duany of DPZ CoDesign, hired by the city that year, argued that the control room and some machinery were industrial art of historical significance and that the roof was the only place in Vero to see the city as a whole. The paper described a pale green control room with vintage analog controls and a style reminiscent of Brutalist architecture.

The City of Vero Beach opened public tours of the power plant on January 18 and January 25, 2020, before a week of design workshops. The debate stayed open through 2020. Vero News reported in November 2020 that Planning Director Jason Jeffries reminded officials the plant stands 10 feet taller than the current height limit, while former mayor Harry Howle favored tearing it down unless a developer committed in a binding contract to restore and maintain it, and former mayor Laura Moss wanted the city itself to decide.

Developers have tended to keep part of the building. Vero News reported on July 21, 2022, that most firms answering the city's request for information planned to incorporate the mid-century modern Vero plant, and Jeffries said that if it were reused, the back part with the boilers would most likely be torn down and only the great hall section saved. The same report put the power plant site at 16 acres north of the Alma Lee Loy Bridge.

Vero Beach voters set the rules for the site. The City of Vero Beach reports that the council adopted the Three Corners master concept plan on February 1, 2022, and that on November 8, 2022, voters approved by 79 percent a charter provision letting the former power plant site be leased for restaurant, retail, hotel and similar uses while keeping public waterfront access. On April 22, 2025, the City Council selected Clearpath Services of Bloomington, Indiana, as preferred developer, and a master development agreement was in negotiation according to the city page as checked on October 8, 2026. None of the sources reviewed for this page reports that the main Big Blue building has been demolished.