ProEnergy Services (PES) was recently contracted to install six Frame 7 DLN1.0 dual-fuel assemblies in Venezuela. The problem: The lead time to purchase the conversion hardware from the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) would not meet the customer’s schedule. The only option was for PES to convert the fuel nozzles removed from a gas-only unit to a dual-fuel configuration, a process that had never before been attempted.

By thoroughly planning their outage strategies well in advance, Southern Company personnel are better able to achieve a number of important objectives, including improving unit economic performance, reducing unplanned maintenance outage hours, completing outages on time and within budget, and ensuring that outage workmanship is of the highest quality.

A lot of attention has focused recently on federal regulation of hydraulic fracturing through the Environmental Protection Agency. But EPA’s ineptitude in air regulation makes a case for state-by-state regulation of oil and gas drilling.

Turbine inlet fogging has been in use now for 20 years in combustion turbine plants. It is an obvious choice for boosting power in hot, dry areas such as Nevada or Arizona, where plants have long used fogging, but it has also proven effective in many other climates.

For the past 15 years, Vietnam has enjoyed enviable gross domestic product increases, averaging 7% annually. That kind of economic growth increases power demand, but financing new capacity remains a challenge. Reaching its ambitious capacity growth goals will require Vietnam to expand its financing and vendor base, attract foreign investment, and ensure future fuel supplies in a region thick with competition for those resources.

Is a changing climate producing greater economic losses from weather events? Or could it be a simple matter of inflation?

The Philippine Coal Plant Users’ Group (PCPUG), the leading nonprofit organization involved in generating electricity in the Philippines, recently held a conference introducing its mission and vision.

Planning for resource adequacy—something that was relatively simple in the context of vertically integrated utilities—continues to be a difficult issue in competitive electricity markets. Whereas state public utility commissions used to have exclusive authority to determine what generation needed to be built and when it was to be available, this responsibility has been assumed by RTO/ISOs in regions with competitive markets. Each region approaches resource planning differently, and each region faces unique problems.

We always talk about project management but rarely discuss project leadership.  There’s a difference.

The POWER Plant of the Year for 2011 was Kansas City Power & Light’s 850-MW Iatan 2, located about 30 miles northwest of Kansas City.

Several new models of plug-in electric vehicles will enter the market in 2012, joining the Nissan LEAF and Chevrolet Volt. The Edison Electric Institute has prepared four suggestions to help utilities smoothly handle the introduction of these vehicles to roads and grids.

When the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in 1986, the response of the Western nuclear industry was, “It can’t happen here.” And then there was Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011. Was one disaster worse than the other?

Houston-based GenOn is the latest of a string of power firms to announce planned power plant closures in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New Jersey. The company formed in December 2010 through the merger of Mirant Corp. and RRI today announced it would deactivate 3,140 MW of generating capacity in PJM’s operational region between June 2012 and May 2015, citing insufficient “forecasted returns on investments necessary to comply with environmental regulations.”

In a landmark ruling that some analysts are calling a “major victory” for the hydropower sector, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court last week overturned a March 2010 decision by the Montana Supreme Court that entitled the state of Montana to collect $89 million in back rent from PPL Montana for that company’s use of state-owned riverbeds for long-standing hydropower plants.

An updated roadmap for the smart grid is now available from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which recently finished reviewing and incorporating roughly 240 comments on the draft version that was released for public comment in October last year.

A severe blaze that broke out on Monday morning at RWE npower’s 750-MW Tilbury power station—a plant recently converted from coal to biomass that has been billed as a pioneer in its use of that technology—raged for two days, until Tuesday, when it was brought under control. All employees at the plant have been accounted for.

A proposed rule issued on Monday by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will not change the greenhouse gas (GHG) permitting thresholds for the Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) and Title V Operating Permit programs. However, it includes revisions to the permitting program that would provide some flexibility in how compliance is achieved with GHG emission caps.

The shield building of FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co.’s (FENOC’s) Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Oak Harbor, Ohio, lacked an exterior weatherproof coating, and this allowed moisture from the blizzard of January 1978 to migrate into the concrete and cause the hairline wall and subsurface cracks discovered during a reactor head replacement outage at the facility last fall, a root cause analysis report indicates.

The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) last week proposed a $428 million upgrade to the Pacific Direct Current Intertie, an 846-mile overhead transmission line that delivers hydropower and wind power between the Northwest and California. The line is one of the world’s longest and highest capacity transmission links.

A study conducted by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and released by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) on Tuesday shows that enough physical and geographical locations exist in the U.S. to site 952 GW of new advanced coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS), dry-cooled and water-cooled concentrating solar power (CSP), and large and small nuclear reactors. The study also suggests that plant siting opportunities exist for compressed air energy storage (CAES) in 38% of the U.S.

Whatever your role in gas-fired power, there’s one constant these days: You probably aren’t bored.

Gas extraction by hydraulic fracturing is not new, but the controversy over it is. While the process carries some notable risks, the potential and promise of fracking argue in favor of responsible development and regulation, not an outright ban.

Hydraulic fracturing has been growing in popularity as a means of extracting natural gas for several years. It was in 2011 that media and public attention began to focus on its possibilities and risks, bringing with it controversy and increasing concern.

Piping at gas-fired plants has long been cleaned using compressed natural gas because of its easy availability. The big problem? It’s also explosive. The fatal 2010 blast at the Kleen Energy plant in Connecticut began a shift toward safer alternatives such as nitrogen and compressed air that is gathering increasing momentum.

Steel mills have long recaptured flue gas from the blast furnace to generate local power and steam. But advances in gas turbine technology have taken what was a low-tech means of increasing plant efficiency and given mill owners ways to increase profits through selling electricity and greatly reducing emissions through more efficient combustion.

Surging supply and plummeting prices during 2011 have worked a sea change in America’s energy policies and use of natural gas. How long can it go on?

Timing is (almost) everything when it comes to building new power plants. Nobody knows that better than AEP, which finally got a happy ending to a story that took over a decade to complete.

The 2000s saw dramatic growth in gas-fired power generation capacity. But, surprise–this growth was also accompanied by the retirements of numerous older gas-fired plants.

The rapid growth of gas extraction by hydraulic fracturing has drawn increasing allegations of property damage and health risks. In many cases, these allegations are being followed by a wave of lawsuits.

Publication of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) final Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) in Thursday’s Federal Register means that the three-year compliance period mandated under the Clean Air Act will begin in 60 days, on April 16, 2012. Thursday’s publication also kicked up a storm of reactions and prompted several legal challenges.