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Baldwin Lake is a reservoir which spans part of the border between Randolph County, Illinois and St. Clair County, Illinois. The lake is part of the Kaskaskia River State Fish and Wildlife Area, near Elevation: , operated by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, and it is adjacent to, but not part of, the Kaskaskia River. Its elevation may fluctuate with powerplant operations, but averages above sea level.〔 ==An engineering feat== While most artificial lakes in Illinois are reservoirs created by damming a river or creek, Baldwin Lake is different. It is a purpose-built cooling pond created by building an levee, near Elevation: ,〔 〕 around a patch of Kaskaskia River bottomland and dredging out sections of the area inside the levee. Its official definition is that it is a ''perched cooling lake''. Most of the lake is relatively shallow, with an average depth of , but the lake has "holes" that are or more in depth. From the air, Baldwin Lake lacks the convoluted shape of many reservoirs. The lake's water surface is the shape of a rectangle. Baldwin Lake was built by the ''Illinois Power Company'' as a cooling pond for its coal-fired Baldwin Generating Station, so called because the nearest town is Baldwin, Illinois. The Baldwin area sits atop a large seam of Illinois coal. The lake was begun in 1967, and completed and filled in 1970. Few if any tributaries naturally flow into Baldwin Lake, and the lake is filled by water pumped from the nearby Kaskaskia River, supplemented by natural precipitation onto the surface of the lake. With the Baldwin Station, Baldwin Lake has changed hands several times since its construction as a result of corporate takeover activity. The lake and generating plant were acquired by the Dynegy energy holding company in 1999. Soon afterwards, the station ceased to burn Illinois coal, instead burning low-sulfur coal from Wyoming. As of 2007, the Baldwin Station complex employs 169 workers and is capable of generating up to 1,750 megawatts of power. The large coal-fired boilers at Baldwin require as much as of water per day to operate. Some of this water escapes as steam, and the rest is returned, heated, to the lake. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Baldwin Lake (Illinois)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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