Silver-Spring-based Competitive Power Ventures has signed an agreement to build a new $500 million, 640-megawatt power plant in Charles County. The new natural gas facility will produce enough energy to serve over six hundred thousand homes. The facility as planned will also use treated wastewater for coolant during the process of the plant’s electric generation operations. The use of the treated wastewater will redirect millions of gallons of effluent held in the Mattawoman wastewater treatment plant ensuring the wastewater never enters the Potomac watershed. CPV state that the new facility would use approximately 650 million gallons or more of the wastewater. Construction is planned to launch in the summer of 2009 in a 77-acre industrial plot near the county landfill and could be ready as soon as summer of 2012 for power generation. The historic water usage agreement reached between CPV and Charles County allows the power plant to use up to 5.4 million gallons of treated wastewater per day for 20 years. CPV maintains that the plant’s emissions profile and environmental impact will be much lower than similar traditional power generation units. The CPV power plant is expected to generate in excess of $56 million in revenues for Charles County over the initial 15 years of operations. The revenue calculated includes a provision for CPV to pay for any needed retrofitting of the county’s water treatment facility. The county and CPV are considering obtaining $30 million tax-exempt financing to pay for the renovations needed at the treatment plant.