Hearn Generating Station 4.43

The Richard L. Hearn Generating Station (named after Richard Lankaster Hearn) is a decommissioned electrical generating station in Toronto. The plant was originally fired by coal, but later converted to burn oil. It was never converted to run natural gas, rather it was replaced by a newer much smaller natural gas plant. It is still owned by Ontario Power Generation, a publicly owned electrical generation company. The plant has been described as "Pharaonic in scale", and encompasses cubic metres of space—large enough to fit 12 Parthenons inside.The plant is located at 440 Unwin Avenue in Toronto's Port Lands area, directly south of the foot of Carlaw Avenue, across the shipping channel and next to the recently opened Portlands Energy Centre. The Richard L. Hearn Generating Station, together with the nearby Ashbridges Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant sewage sludge incinerator stack and the Commissioners Street waste incinerator stack, stand as towering landmarks of a bygone industrial era in the Portlands area of Toronto (all three facilities are no longer in operation, but their towering smokestacks still stand).HistoryThe R. L. Hearn Generating Station was the site of Canada's first steam turbo-generator set. The station sits in what was once Ashbridge's Bay, a shallow marsh that was filled in with rubble from downtown construction sites from 1911 to 1950s. The station was officially opened on October 26, 1951 by Leslie Frost, Premier of Ontario, with the first two units in service. Four units were in operation by 1953. The plant originally burned coal which was transported on ships through the Saint Lawrence Seaway. The station was designed by Stone & Webster. The turbine generators were built by Parsons in England and the boilers were made in Canada by Babcock & Wilcox (Cambridge, Ontario) and Combustion Engineering (Montreal, Quebec).