Western Area Power Administration - Desert Southwest Region (WALC)
Western Area Power Administration - Desert Southwest Region (WALC) is a balancing authority on the North American grid. On the map it has 24 power plants with 6.8 GW of capacity, hydro the largest share at 3.8 GW. Its peak load is 161 MW.
At a glance
- Peak load: 161 MW
Capacity by fuel
24 power plants with 6.8 GW of capacity, planned generators left out.
- Hydro: 3.8 GW from 7 plants (56%)
- Natural gas: 1.6 GW from 4 plants (24%)
- Solar: 908 MW from 9 plants (13%)
- Wind: 350 MW from 1 plant (5%)
- Battery storage: 76 MW from 2 plants (1%)
- Pumped storage: 40 MW from 1 plant (1%)
Largest plants
- Glen Canyon Dam: Hydro, 1.3 GW, Arizona
- Hoover Dam (AZ): Hydro, 1 GW, Arizona
- Hoover Dam (NV): Hydro, 1 GW, Nevada
- Apache Station: Natural gas, 624 MW, Arizona
- South Point Energy Center: Natural gas, 517 MW, Arizona
- Sundance: Natural gas, 490 MW, Arizona
- Roadrunner Solar and BESS: Solar, 470 MW, Arizona
- Mohave County Wind Farm: Wind, 350 MW, Arizona
- Davis Dam: Hydro, 255 MW, Arizona
- Townsite Solar Project Hybrid: Solar, 250 MW, Nevada
Planned and under construction
6 generators planned, under construction or testing, 1.6 GW in all, not counted above.
- Solar: 1.4 GW
- Natural gas: 172 MW
States and provinces
- Arizona: 19 plants
- California: 3 plants
- Nevada: 2 plants
Sources
Power plants: EIA-860M (US); NRCan NACEI (Canada, Mexico); WRI GPPD (Mexico); OpenStreetMap via Geofabrik (Canada, Mexico gap fill); USGS USWTDB/USPVDB; EPA eGRID; Natural Earth admin-1; HIFLD control areas; location attributes from WorldPop (R2025A), Global Solar Atlas PVOUT, Global Wind Atlas 4, USFS Wildfire Hazard Potential, the USGS National Seismic Hazard Model and the previous publish's lines and substations; water distances from OpenStreetMap via Geofabrik; gas distances and county queue from the previous publish's EIA gas pipelines and LBNL Queued Up requests; nearest city from Natural Earth populated places; cooling degree days from NOAA NCEI nClimDiv county normals; elevation and slope from the Copernicus DEM GLO-30 (ESA, via AWS Open Data); water stress from WRI Aqueduct 4.0; ozone nonattainment from the EPA Green Book; drought from the U.S. Drought Monitor; tribal land from US Census TIGER/Line. License: ODbL (derivative database; EIA content is public domain, NRCan OGL-Canada, WRI GPPD CC BY 4.0; location attributes from WorldPop, Global Solar Atlas, Global Wind Atlas, LBNL Queued Up and WRI Aqueduct CC BY 4.0, USFS, USGS, EIA, NOAA, EPA, US Census and Natural Earth public domain, Copernicus DEM GLO-30 © DLR e.V. and Airbus Defence and Space GmbH, the U.S. Drought Monitor courtesy of NDMC)
Balancing authorities: HIFLD Control Areas (position, peak load); EIA-930 reference tables (which BAs are active); EIA-861 (a feature's BA); Wattlas outlines for Canadian and Mexican BAs. License: Public domain