The plant is named after J. Robert Welsh, a former President and Board Chairman of SWEPCO.

All three units were installed with boilers from Babcock & Wilcox and turbines from Westinghouse.

[2] In 2012, AEP announced they were reducing output at Unit 2 to coincide with the commencement of commercial operations at John W. Turk Jr. Coal Plant in Arkansas.

[3] Unit 2 was officially decommissioned in April 2016 as a part of a major retrofitting project to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) for Units 1 and 3.

[5] The remaining two units use sub-bituminous coal mined from the Powder River Basin shipped via rail.