RUSH ISLAND, Mo. — Ameren officials say they are not planning on selling the Rush Island Energy Center despite it being disconnected from the grid and retired on Oct. 15.

What You Need To Know

  • Rush Island Energy Center, a coal power plant, retired on Oct. 15

  • “We still own the property. We plan to continue owning it. Obviously the inner connections there with the transmission system make it really valuable for putting in another project that can be connected to the grid,” said an Ameren spokesperson 

  • All 90 employees were offered Ameren employment elsewhere

  • The plant will go through three to six months of decommissioning acitivities before the multi-year demolition

“We still own the property. We plan to continue owning it. Obviously the inner connections there with the transmission system make it really valuable for putting in another project that can be connected to the grid,” said the Ameren spokesperson.

Over the next three to six months, a handful of the 90 employees that worked for the energy center will stay to help with the decommissioning activities. Ameren said each of those employees was offered a new Ameren position elsewhere. After the decommissioning activities conclude, the multi-year demolition process of Rush Island Energy Center will start. 

Ameren, which had been operating the plant for years in violation of the Clean Air Act, said it would retire the plant 15 years early rather than put into place pollution controls ordered by a federal court.  

In June 2024, the Missouri Public Service Commission’s made a decision in the securitization case on the early retirement of the Rush Island Energy Center. Securitization, passed by Missouri legislature in 2021, allows investor-owned utilities, such as Ameren, to acquire certain energy transition costs associated with natural disasters and the retirement of electric generating facilities.

Ameren Missouri sought authority to securitize the transition costs: $512,760,332 for the plant’s retirement, according to a press release from Missouri Public Service Commission. The Public Service Commission found securitization would be beneficial to customers and determined an estimated energy transition cost of approximately $461,418,810 if the plant retired on Oct. 15. The commission authorized Ameren Missouri to recover the securitized costs over the next 15 years.

Future plans for the site remain unknown, but the connectivity to the grid makes the land too valuable for Ameren to sell. 

In 2022, Ameren retired their Meramec Energy Center, a coal power plant in Oakville, Mo. Despite opposition from the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, Ameren hopes to build the proposed Castle Bluff Energy Center, a natural gas combustion turbine power plant, at the old Oakville site.