The Columbia Generating Station located near Richland, Washington is now putting enough electricity on the grid to serve about 40,000 more homes compared to its output five years ago. The difference has been the maintenance and improvements made during its refueling outages. Testing has confirmed that the Columbia Generating Station’s output increased by at least 28 megawatts following the refueling and maintenance outage that concluded this past June. That additional megawatt increase is mostly from work on valves throughout the plant during the most recent outage.Installation of a new feedwater flowmeter, which measures the amount of water flowing through the reactor core, also helped to increase the megawatts because the more water that can be used, the greater potential power output.