As the development of South Baltimore’s Port Covington gets underway, a swath of adjacent waterfront acreage currently occupied by a defunct power plant was acquired by a commercial real estate company based in Lutherville-Timonium for $3.525 million.

Greenspring Realty Partners Inc. announced the purchase Thursday of the five-and-a-half-acre property, home to the non-operational Gould Street Power Plant and some 400 feet of riverfront as well as a deep-water berth and bulkhead. The company’s interest in the property stems from increasing demand for waterfront sites across the region, said Dan Flamholz, Greenspring Realty’s principal, in a statement.

“As part of the long-range development program planned for Port Covington, the area will be significantly modernized and expanded through the surrounding highway infrastructure which will be beneficial to our Gould Street site,” Flamholz said.

Plans for the Port Covington development, which officially broke ground earlier this year, call for a sprawling 1.1 million square feet of mixed-use space featuring offices, apartments, shops and parks. Questions remain as to what tenants will occupy the space, though three commercial tenants have announced their intentions to move in so far.

The power plant, once a South Baltimore fixture, was formerly owned by Exelon Corp., which recently shut it down. The coal-burning plant generated electricity for more than 100 years.

Flamholz said the Gould Street site has drawn interest from a “wide variety” of users involved in “stockpiling operations with materials that need to be stored and shipped” as well as those in the fields of “logistics work, wastewater treated and related maritime uses.”

The company has acquired 30 acres of maritime-related waterfront properties in the last year, including a 12-acre site adjacent to Seagirt Marine Terminal in South Baltimore.