POWER

Vestas, the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer, plans to lay off 2,355 employees (about 10% of its workforce), reduce its fixed costs by more than €150 million ($192 million), reorganize management, and close one of its 26 factories in preparation for a potential slowdown in the U.S. wind market in case the production tax credit is not extended at the end of 2012, the Danish firm said on Thursday.

A lease-purchase transaction for a new combined cycle plant in Rogersville, Tenn., completed by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) on Tuesday could provide the U.S. government–owned corporation $1 billion in financing to support completion of the 1,260-MW Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Hollywood, Ala., by 2020.

Électricité de France (EDF), Constellation Energy’s partner in five nuclear plants on three sites in Maryland and New York and a 7.2% owner of Constellation shares, on Tuesday withdrew its opposition to a $7.9 billion merger between Baltimore-based Constellation and Chicago-based Exelon Corp. The French company said it had reached an agreement with Exelon to protect the “operational autonomy” of the Constellation Energy Nuclear Group (CENG).

Two reports assessing wave and tidal resources in the U.S. released today by the Department of Energy (DOE) suggest that water power—including conventional hydropower and wave, tidal, and other resources—could provide 15% of the nation’s electricity by 2030.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week released, for the first time, data collected under its Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Reporting Program. The data set shows that in 2010, power plants were the largest direct emitters of GHGs, followed by petroleum refineries. The database was released as the agency continues work on GHG standards for new and modified power plants, which may be released by the end of this month.

The U.S. power sector will see heightened electricity consumption over the next two years, a spurt in natural gas–fueled power generation that is expected to offset a slight decline in coal power, and a significant decline in hydropower generation that could mark a decline in overall renewable generation, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) says in its latest short-term outlook.

By Kennedy Maize   Washington, D.C., January 12, 2012 — The ancient English idiom “It’s an ill wind that blows no good” takes on specificity following an article in tomorrow’s Science magazine. The article argues that increased winds in the Southern Ocean, likely caused by a changing global climate, are a boon to the wandering […]

Two of Vermont’s largest power distribution companies on Monday filed suit against Entergy Vermont Yankee, owner of the aging 620-MW Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant in Vernon, Vt., alleging that Entergy’s faulty maintenance of cooling towers at the plant in 2007 and 2008 had cost them $6.6 million in increased power costs and lost capacity payments.

The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) on Friday asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for a rehearing of a decision it made last December, when it ruled the Pacific Northwest–based federal agency discriminated against wind generators after the BPA curtailed wind power when high river flows hit the region last May and June.

New policy on nuclear safety regulation could limit the operational life of Japanese nuclear plants to 40 years and require operators to prepare for severe accidents, Japan’s government announced on Friday. If the new law is passed, at least 13 plants, as well as the six Fukushima Daiichi reactors, will be shut down per the […]

Myanmar’s government on Monday cancelled construction of a 4,000-MW coal-fired power plant proposed by Thai company Italian-Thai Development on public concerns about the plant’s environmental impact.

The newest initiative to protect the nation’s power grid from cyber attacks is the “Electric Sector Cybersecurity Risk Management Maturity” project, led by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The project is expected to leverage the insight of private and public sector grid experts and build on existing cybersecurity measures and strategies.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), an organization representing state public service commissioners, joined forces to launch a forum to explore reliability issues that could crop up as a result of new and pending environmental rules for the power sector.

A new report published by the Institute for Electric Efficiency (IEE) finds that electric energy efficiency savings are on the rise in the U.S.—and that electric utilities accounted for a vast majority of ratepayer-funded electric efficiency expenditures in 2010.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit temporarily blocked the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) just two days before it was set to go into effect. The federal court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to continue administering the previously promulgated Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) until a final decision can be made on the merits of the rule, likely this summer or fall.

An AES Corp. subsidiary that owns more than 1,000 MW of coal-fired capacity at six facilities in New York last week filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing falling power prices and heightened costs from compliance with environmental regulations.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) last week upheld a decision by the state’s Department of Public Utilities (DPU) that a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) between Cape Wind and utility National Grid would be a cost-effective use of ratepayer money. The decision means Cape Wind is closer to building North America’s first offshore wind farm.

Pennsylvania’s Sunbury Generation, a company that owns the Shamokin Dam plant—the nation’s oldest coal-fired power plant—last week reportedly said it would close five of its six coal-fired generation units and replace them with two natural gas–fired turbines by 2015. The company cited stricter regulations on power plant emissions.

The Department of the Interior (DOI) on Thursday approved a 275-MW solar plant in California and a 104-MW wind farm in Oregon that will be built on private lands and use power lines that cross public lands to connect to their respective grids. The projects are the 26th and 27th renewable projects approved by the DOI in the past two years.

The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) plans to begin construction of six new 500-kV overhead transmission lines at the Grand Coulee Dam—the nation’s largest hydropower facility—next month, the public service organization said last week. The new lines will help ensure continued safe and reliable transmission of power between Grand Coulee Dam’s third power plant and the BPA’s vast high-voltage power grid.

PJM Interconnection on Sunday began operational control of the transmission systems of Duke Energy Ohio and Duke Energy Kentucky, both subsidiaries of Duke Energy, and began administering open, competitive wholesale electricity markets in those areas, the regional grid operator said on Jan 1.

South Korea, China Poised to Make Colossal Investments in Wind Power. South Korea, a nation that recently announced it would spend 1 trillion won ($884 million) on feed-in tariffs for wind and solar projects, on Nov. 10 said it planned to invest 10.2 trillion won ($9 billion) in a 2.5-GW offshore wind farm that could […]

SunPower has introduced the SunPower C7 Tracker, a solar photovoltaic (PV) tracking system that concentrates the sun’s power seven times to achieve what the company claims could be “the lowest levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for utility-scale solar power plants available today.” The C7 Tracker combines single-axis tracking technology with rows of parabolic mirrors, reflecting […]

Measuring the level of dust and fly ash collected in electrostatic precipitators (ESPs) is a very difficult technical problem. At one utility, level switches were so unreliable that operators could not trust their readings because failures were so frequent. When a switch did fail, the precipitator would often clog up, costing the utility up to $100,000 in downtime and repair costs.

Columbia Research Laboratories has introduced the Model VM-300 vibration meter, a general purpose vibration-measuring instrument designed for periodic routine checks of industrial equipment where portability and ease of use are required. Acceleration, velocity, and displacement measurement modes are provided, along with a number of value-enhancing features. Dual power allows the VM-300 to be powered from […]

Friends, colleagues, and co-workers uniformly called him "The Boss." His life was a story of failure after failure. His greatest fame was his greatest failure—a journey begun nearly 100 years ago, in 1914, to cross the desolate Antarctic continent by land. His doughty ship Endurance became trapped by the encroaching ice in the Weddell Sea north of the continent, isolating Sir Ernest Shackleton and his 27-man crew.

Over the past 11 years, the Powder River Basin Coal Users’ Group (PRBCUG) has grown to become the voice of North American generating companies that are dedicated to the safe and efficient use of PRB coal. POWER, the group’s media sponsor, has reported on the PRBCUG’s annual meetings, which are colocated with the ELECTRIC POWER Conference & Exhibition each year. POWER also reports annually on the group’s coal plant of the year award. For 2011, in the large plant category the award went to Kansas City Power & Light’s Iatan Unit 2 (see our August 2011 issue); the small plant category winner, Muscatine Power & Water, is profiled in this issue, beginning on page 56.

There is a fine line between personnel management and intruding into the personal lives of employees. Staying on the right side of that line is challenging, particularly when prior legal decision are mixed.

The 2011 Marmaduke Award winner was CTG Universidad, a two-unit combustion turbine plant built in the early 1970s in Monterrey, Mexico. The award was made to the plant in recognition of its upgrade of one 14-MW unit to operate as a synchronous condenser, thus relaxing power restrictions caused by a lack of sufficient reactive power production in the north of the city. More reactive power production by this urban plant also allows delivery of more power produced by efficient combined cycle plants located outside the city, because it reduces the amount of reactive power that must be moved over transmission lines.

As the resource gets increased and more sophisticated scrutiny, natural gas from shale looks increasingly like a revolutionary force in energy markets. Most recently, the Washington-based environmental and energy think tank Resources for the Future rolled out a serious analysis of the new method of developing gas, and the issues it presents. The preliminary results look very positive for gas.