Seaholm Power Plant

About this property

The Seaholm Power Plant is a historic former power station located on the north shore of Lady Bird Lake in Downtown Austin, Texas. Opened in 1951, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark. The power plant ceased operation in 1996, and the facility and site were later redeveloped into a mixed-use district. The Seaholm Power Plant was commissioned in 1948 to meet Austin's growing demand for electric power. The engineering firm Burns & McDonnell designed the complex, which was constructed in two phases in 1951 and 1955. The facility originally included a turbine generator building, a water intake structure, and an oil heating building. A guard booth and a storage building were added to the site later. Originally called "Power Plant No. 2," on 2 June 1960 the plant was renamed posthumously for Walter E. Seaholm, a prominent figure in the administration of Austin's municipal utilities. Seaholm served as Austin's sole source of electric power from 1950 to 1959, until demand outpaced the 120 megawatts the plant could generate with all five boilers running. As other stations were built the city's reliance on Seaholm waned, and in 1989 the plant stopped providing power to the city, though it was used as a training facility until 1996, when it closed entirely. The site lay dormant until 2004, when the Austin City Council requested proposals for redevelopment partners. Several firms and consultancies formed an organization called "Seaholm Power, LLC", which was designated in April 2005 to lead redevelopment of the defunct power plant and the surrounding site. A master development agreement was reached with the city in April 2008 specifying the renovations and new construction that would be undertaken. Work began on the plant's redevelopment in mid-2013. The interior of the turbine generator building was converted to a mixture of office, retail and restaurant space, with tenants occupying the facility beginning in 2015. A residential tower called Seaholm Residences was constructed at the west end of the site, also opening in 2015. As of 2021, the city has not selected a final plan for the redevelopment of the water intake facility. Seaholm was a semi-outdoor power plant, with its boilers outdoors but its generators inside the turbine generator building. It ultimately housed five Westinghouse turbine generators; the plant was originally built with two 20-megawatt generators and later expanded with two more 20-megawatt units and then one larger 40-megawatt unit. Seaholm was built with underground ash pits to accommodate coal-firing, but in fact the plant never ran on coal; the oil heating building and underground fuel tanks also allowed the plant to burn crude oil, yet over its operating lifetime it was fired primarily with natural gas.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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