ESAB Welding & Cutting Products introduced a new addition to the Weld Warrior line of personal protection equipment. The company’s FR Line of flame-retardant clothing is designed to give maximum protection to the professional welder while providing comfort in the most demanding environments. The new FR Line includes The Jersey—a lightweight pullover that is perfect […]

Aging infrastructure ranks at the top of the U.S. electric power sector’s concerns, flanked by the exorbitant investment needed to keep the system in good repair.

The U.S. hydropower industry has undergone a renaissance in recent years. One of the major drivers of the industry’s growth, the establishment of the production tax credit (PTC) for hydro, has seen strong policy support from our elected officials in Washington, D.C. More than any other federal policy, tax incentives, particularly the PTC, have sparked a level of growth in the industry not seen in nearly two decades.

Siemens Infrastructure & Cities and Munich city utility Stadtwerke München (SWM) this April put into operation a virtual power plant (VPP), linking several small-scale distributed energy sources and pooling their resources so they can be operated as a single installation (Figure 1). The project comes on the heels of a February 2012 expansion of a […]

Within the two months since the Department of Energy (DOE) flourished $452 million in cost-shared federal funding to support engineering, design certification, and licensing from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for up to two small modular reactor (SMR) designs over five years, four developers of reactors under 300 MW have submitted applications: Westinghouse, Babcock & […]

India’s long-term annual economic growth rate is projected at over 7%, and the country is investing in its hydroelectric, nuclear, and renewable resources. However, the primary fuel used to produce electricity remains coal, and the government has ambitious plans to significantly increase coal-fired capacity. Those plans have been challenged by a number of unexpected factors that threaten to stifle India’s economic growth. India’s long-term annual economic growth rate is projected at over 7%, and the country is investing in its hydroelectric, nuclear, and renewable resources. However, the primary fuel used to produce electricity remains coal, and the government has ambitious plans to significantly increase coal-fired capacity. Those plans have been challenged by a number of unexpected factors that threaten to stifle India’s economic growth.

A two-year project begun this April by Southern Co. and a consortium of partners including boiler vendors Alstom, Babcock & Wilcox, Foster Wheeler, and Riley Power; the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI); and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory will gather data on the performance of alloy materials under advanced ultrasupercritical (USC) temperatures of about 1,400F. […]

A West Coast combined cycle plant that uses reclaimed water found that cycling 300 times a year caused disruptions to the plant’s cooling water chemical treatment program. The solution was a performance-based monitoring and control system that uses available plant operating data plus algorithms to measure corrosion rates and fouling factors, which in turn allows the plant to trim chemical feed rates so they correlate with a specified corrosion rate, rather than a suggested chemical residual.

In May—as a trade war raged between Chinese solar panel manufacturers and exporters and their counterparts in the U.S. and the European Union concerning the world’s plummeting crystalline silicone photovoltaic module prices—a 28.8-MW thin-film copper indium gallium (di)selenide (CIGS or CIS) solar power plant came online. Developers Solar Frontier, the world’s largest manufacturer of CIS […]

Power generators typically allocate construction risks through the process of aversion. Owners have a tendency to shift risk to a project’s primary contractor, who in turn pushes it to lower-tier parties in the contracting arrangement. Research by the Construction Industry Institute has found that there are more equitable ways to allocate project risk.

The Republic of Korea’s National Assembly on May 2 passed legislation that will mandate cuts in greenhouse gases (GHGs) starting in 2015. The Act on Allocation and Trading of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Allowances passed with a near unanimous vote of 140-0, with three abstentions. It follows the country’s voluntary GHG emissions reduction target of 30% […]

Panelists at the ELECTRIC POWER Keynote and Roundtable Discussion in Baltimore in May wrestled with a range of issues. But despite calls for a “balanced portfolio,” an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, and predictions of “more changes in the next 10 years than in the last 100,” the focus of attention appears to be the decidedly mundane displacement of coal by natural gas.

The second of Georgia Power’s three natural gas combined cycle units at Plant McDonough-Atkinson in Smyrna, Ga., came online on April 26 (Figure 7). The first unit at the plant became operational in December 2011, and the third unit, currently under construction, is expected to come online in November 2012, increasing the plant’s capacity from […]

Panelists at ELECTRIC POWER discussed how U.S. utilities choose renewable power generation technologies based on their geographic locations, state requirements, economics, and other criteria—including reliability and federal regulations.

UK Unveils Draft Energy Reform Bill. A draft energy bill unveiled by the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change on May 22 seeks to attract £110 billion ($168 billion) of investment to build new nuclear, renewables, and carbon capture and storage (CCS) plants to replace nearly a fifth of the country’s total power capacity, […]

As U.S. utilities seek to increase the percentage of carbon-neutral biomass used in their generation portfolios, they must deal with a number of complex challenges unique to this fuel source. Several breakthrough technologies are poised to help promote greater use of biomaterials.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has the responsibility for ensuring just and reasonable rates and preventing undue discrimination by public utility transmission providers. Last year FERC defined a new framework for public utilities and regional transmission organizations planning new transmission networks. The framework is provided in Order No. 1000—Transmission Planning and Allocation by Transmission Owning and Operating Public Utilities. The Final Rule was issued on July 21, 2011, and reaffirmed by Order No. 1000-A on May 17, 2012.

Efforts by power producers to meet clean air rules mean that wastewater effluent streams now face revised EPA regulations. A skirmish involving a New Hampshire power plant could set the tone for the next battle over regulations.

Practically everyone would agree that the energy policy of the U.S. is in a great state of flux. Not since the introduction of commercial nuclear power some five decades ago has our country come to such an energy crossroads. No matter what your political ideology, no one can refute that conventional coal-fired power plants are being paralyzed by recent and potential U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations designed to cut the nation’s reliance on coal.

With new reactors finally under construction, this should be an optimistic time for nuclear power in the U.S. But cheap natural gas, rising construction costs, and the Fukushima accident’s lingering pall have darkened the mood.

The primary considerations in slurry valve selection are reliability in function and design, abrasion resistance, and ease of maintenance. In addition, valves with a straight-through, unobstructed flow minimize the effect of abrasion and therefore reduce the need for maintenance.

The season’s blockbuster includes white-hatted heroes, good-natured regulatory sidekicks, bar fights, and a lurking menace named Fugitive Dust.

California is approaching a tipping point with respect to the near-term economic viability of existing non-utility generation. The procurement policies and practices implemented in response to the statewide energy crisis over a decade ago have evolved into market conditions that do not offer “uncontracted” existing resources with sufficient and stable enough revenue streams to recover going-forward costs. Continued adherence to these policies will subject such resources to an increasing risk of economic retirement, threatening long-term reliability and potentially costing electric consumers billions of dollars.

A diverse range of speakers reviewed the state of gas-fired generation at ELECTRIC POWER, but there was one constant: flexibility

Santee Cooper’s Cross Station has implemented a catalyst optimization program that reduces catalyst replacement cost while maximizing catalyst performance. This case study illustrates the economic advantages of taking a holistic approach to optimizing unit catalyst performance by controlling slag, fouling, sulfur trioxide, and ammonium bisulfate—key factors that lead to premature shortening of catalyst life. With catalyst costing $2 million a layer and up, there is plenty of economic motivation to find ways to improve its life.

Emerson has launched the latest solution for combustion flue gas analysis, the Rosemount Analytical 6888 in-situ oxygen analyzer. The 6888 analyzer provides accurate measurement of oxygen remaining in flue gases coming from combustion processes such as boilers, incinerators, kilns, process heaters, and industrial heating furnaces. By maintaining the ideal level of oxygen in the flue […]

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Tuesday ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was "unambiguously correct" in its interpretation of the Clean Air Act (CAA) to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. The federal agency’s endangerment finding that greenhouse gases (GHG), including carbon dioxide, are a threat to public health and welfare, and its decision to set limits for industrial and automotive emissions of GHGs, was "neither arbitrary nor capricious," the court ruled. The court, however, found that it lacked jurisdiction to review the timing and scope of the GHG rules that affect larger stationary sources, including new coal-fired power plants.

The State of Vermont "repeatedly failed" to present to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) objections that Entergy Corp., owner of the controversial Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station, lacked a necessary state water permit before the commission granted the reactor a 20-year operating license extension, a federal court ruled on Tuesday as it threw out the state’s legal challenge against the NRC.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers properly followed permitting procedures when it verified that Puget Sound Energy (PSE) could lower a dam in the single narrow channel above Washington State’s landmark Snoqualmie Falls to mitigate flooding issues upstream, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on Tuesday.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) finalized a key rule that intends to facilitate the integration of variable energy resources (VERs) and proposed another that clarifies the reporting of transactions involving energy storage facilities. The body also announced in the past week that it would soon eliminate the current system used by public utilities to report required electricity data on a quarterly basis, as well as approve the North American Electric Reliability Corp.’s (NERC’s) revisions to the definition of the bulk electric system.