The facility opened in the early 1950s and consists of two 280 megawatts (970 million British thermal units per hour) Babcock & Wilcox cyclone boilers each with one steam turbine.

Originally designed to burn Illinois Basin bituminous coal supplied by rail car or barge, the site switched to natural gas or lower sulfur Powder River Basin coal.

[1] Coal has not been burned at the site since 2007 because the facility closed the landfill it had used for fly ash.

[3] Electricity was generated via steam turbines and process water was taken from the Rock River.

[5][6][7] A second combined cycle natural gas plant was approved for construction March 31, 2016 at Riverside Energy Center, just west of the Rock River Generating station.