Lindon Council members toured the facility March 6. City manager Ott Dameron said the tour was arranged to better enable council members to answer questions about the plant that residents might have, including queries about noise and possible pollution.

Plant managers said repeatedly that they would like to get rid of one word used again and again to describe the plant by tour groups and concerned residents: smoke.

The sometimes huge plume coming up from the plant is water vapor, nothing more, they stressed.

“There is no smoke here,” said plant manager John Bowater.

Managers also stressed another message they are hoping to get out into the community: encourage your children to become engineers. There are not enough qualified people available to replace engineers nearing retirement, they said.

“There is no one to replace us,” said safety manager Dave Verdi, noting he has worked in the industry for 26 years and he is the “baby” of the company. “We are trying to get kids interested, to let them know that someone has to keep the lights on for us.”

“No one wants to get their hands dirty anymore,” Bowater said. “You would not believe how hard it is to get people interested these days. There are good jobs in engineering.”

There is a chance the natural gas turbine plant, which just opened in September 2007, could be expanded, officials said. Over the next year, either the Vineyard or Mona plant could be chosen for an expansion needed to help meet a growing demand for electricity.

The plant is two and a half times cleaner than coal-fired plants and emits virtually no particulate matter into the air, or sulfur dioxide, officials said. State regulators have said they would like electrical power expansion to happen in plants that do not burn coal, said spokesman Dave Eskelsen.

The plant produces upwards of 600 megawatts of power on the coldest days, and 540 megawatts on average, officials said. The machinery runs at 56 percent efficiency, almost double some older plants, and just 4 percent lower than the most efficient plant in the world.

The plant employs 46 people, with just two people on site during some shifts, Bowater said. Homeland Security has already been to the plant, stressing that it, along with other energy plants across the nation, could be the target of terrorists and so security is high.

The plant has become somewhat famous for an incident in the middle of the night not long after it opened when a computer glitch caused a safety value to blow, creating a tremendous noise that was heard all over Utah Valley, waking some residents and causing others to think an earthquake or other natural disaster had happened.

Though a repeat of that event is not expected, within two weeks, those valves will be fitted with special silencers, just in case, Bowater said.

The plant is owned by PacifiCorp and is part of a network that provides power to 1.6 million people in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington and California, said Eskelsen.