At night, the Mountainview Generating Station takes on an entirely different character. During the day it is an industrial complex of concrete, steel, pipes, and machinery, but after dark the plant glows against the black sky, its stacks rising above a maze of illuminated structures. The warm industrial lights and red warning beacons turn a working power station into something unexpectedly dramatic.
Located in Redlands, California, Mountainview is an active 1,056-megawatt natural-gas generating station owned by Southern California Edison. It is one of the larger conventional generating stations in Southern California. Its modern generating units have been operating since 2005 and 2006, supplying electricity to the Southern California grid.
What interested me most in making this photograph was not so much the machinery itself, but the contrast between light and darkness, scale and detail, and the rigid geometry of the plant against an almost empty night sky. It is the kind of place most people pass without a second glance, yet through the camera it becomes a landscape of light, structure, and energy.