JESSUP -- The construction manager on the Invenergy power plant site in Jessup believes work is on, or ahead, of schedule.
Even from a mile away from the power plant's site, you can see six cranes.
When we got a close-up look at the site, we saw how the work is well under way.
The 52-acre site was once abandoned land owned by a coal company. It's now a major construction site for what will be a natural-gas-powered energy plant.
About 350 people now work there. By June, 800 workers will be building three electric generators.
"The best part about this job is I don't have to travel that far," said worker Morgan Pensak.
Pensak commutes just 15 minutes to get there. Most local construction workers are used to driving at least an hour to get to work.
"We do a lot of jobs everywhere with the pipeline, but this is actually the closest I've ever been to home," said Pensak.
Jason Proskovec is the operations manager for Kiewit Construction, the company building the plant for Invenergy. He says the project is almost 1/3 complete.
"By the end of summer, the wow factor will be there because all the equipment will be set," Proskovec said.
The plant is expected to be producing electricity by June of 2018, and by the end of next year, all three generators are expecting to be generating a total of 1,500 megawatts of electricity.
That's 11 percent more energy than one of the reactors at the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station nuclear plant near Berwick generates.
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Members of the group opposing the Invenergy plant released a statement.
"The construction of this plant so far has proven that many of our concerns over visual pollution, noise, dust, and increased traffic were well founded."
But Invenergy's senior project manager says the company is creating jobs and looking for 30 full-time workers to staff the plant when it is up and running.
"And we will source as many of those jobs as we can locally, from the local labor pool," said project manager Adam Taylor.
In the next two weeks, the first of three large turbines will arrive at the site by rail from South Carolina.
In the overnight hours, some roads will be shut down so the turbine can be moved from a railyard to the plant.