In November 2008, a central Texas utility commissioned HPI, a full-service turbomachinery design and construction firm based in Houston, to perform a major upgrade of its plant’s power distribution and turbine control systems.

With natural gas serving as the fuel de jour, many utilities and merchant generators will be considering the purchase of new combustion turbines in the near future. If you are in the market for a gas turbine, here are some key design features you should discuss with turbine vendors prior to your next purchase.

Duke Energy will retire two coal-fired units at the four-unit 560-MW Gallagher Station in New Albany, Ind., instead of converting them to natural gas if regulators approve the company’s plans to buy the 640-MW natural gas–fired Vermillion Energy Facility in Cayuga, Ind.

Even though Texas is again basking in warm weather, federal regulators are still investigating the rolling blackouts that hit the Lone Star state during a record-breaking cold snap in early February.

Life-cycle cost of ownership is a common metric used to compare power plant system alternatives. However, the familiar formula for calculating the cost of generating electricity omits factors that are becoming increasingly important to business decisions. A new formula addresses those blind spots by estimating the value of the part-load performance of cycling combined-cycle plants.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on Thursday announced he would withdraw his state by the end of the year from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI)—a cap-and-trade carbon trading system that involves 10 Northeastern states—because the “program is not effective in reducing greenhouse gases and is unlikely to be in the future,” he said. The governor also said the state would not permit any new coal plants and that it would shut down “dirtier” intermediate and peaker plants.

Someone once said that "life begins at retirement." For people, perhaps, but not for our aging inventory of coal-fired power plants that are slated for retirement during the next decade.

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., May 31, 2011 — By the time you read this, the event may have already happened. The Washington rumor mill is rumbling loudly that President Obama will name John Bryson, former California electric company executive, to be commerce secretary, replacing Gary Locke, who will be named U.S. ambassador to China. […]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has acknowledged in a letter to non-profit power trade organization Utility Air Regulatory Group (UARG) that it made a conversion error in the way mercury emissions data was calculated to set limits for the agency’s mercury maximum achievable control technology (MACT) floor in the proposed Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule.

Fifteen states on Monday, led by Texas, filed an opening brief in a legal challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) finding that greenhouse gases (GHGs) pose a danger to public health and welfare.

The Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) on Tuesday rejected a request by Exelon Corp.’s energy delivery arm ComEd to charge customers for several smart grid initiatives, including advanced meter deployment. The commission, however, approved ComEd’s request to collect an additional $155.7 million–a 7.6% increase over current revenue—through new delivery rates.

The Department of Energy (DOE) on Thursday conditionally offered a $737 million loan guarantee to support SolarReserve’s Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project, a 110-MW molten salt concentrating solar power (CSP) tower generating facility. The project would be the first of its kind in the U.S. and the tallest molten salt tower in the world, the federal agency said.

Efforts to confirm regulatory review of Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactor design have resulted in the uncovering of “additional technical issues,” which Westinghouse must resolve before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) can consider finalizing certification for the design, NRC Chair Gregory Jaczko said on Friday.

An annual survey of more than 100 executives from the U.S. and Canadian electric and natural gas industries by consulting firm Capgemini has found that the five most critical challenges facing the North American energy industry are environmental regulation, aging infrastructure, non-environmental regulation, an aging industry workforce, and the need for new pricing mechanisms.

In the past week Luminant’s proposed Comanche Peak Units 3 and 4 and UniStar’s proposed Calvert Cliffs Unit 3 reactors received environmental approvals associated with applications for combined construction and operation licenses (COLs) from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). 

There’s a lot to see and learn on the Exhibit Hall floor, but you only learn when you ask questions. Following are the paraphrased answers to this question: What’s one thing about your company that isn’t widely known that attendees would find interesting? INSERT FLOOR PHOTO Innovative Energy (110): We offer the first truly distributed, scalable model for […]

It’s the final day of ELECTRIC POWER 2011 . . . Conference sessions end at noon. Exhibit Floor hours today: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Last chance to see it all! Are you attending ELECTRIC POWER just for today? Visit the Registration booth from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. to get your badge. Lunch: on the Exhibit Floor […]

Helping Small Reactors Survive the Licensing Process Imagine fission in a bottle. That’s what Ed Wallace of NuScale Power described at the ELECTRIC POWER session on nuclear power Wednesday morning. What NuScale is cooking up is a small (45 MWe), modular, and scalable light-water reactor, contained inside what is essentially a large vacuum bottle resting […]

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on Tuesday conditionally offered a $90.6 million loan guarantee to support the construction of Cogentrix of Alamosa’s Alamosa Solar Generating Project. The 30-MW (net capacity) High Concentration Solar Photovoltaic (HCPV) generation project in south-central Colorado near the city of Alamosa will source over 80% of its components from the U.S, the DOE said.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) on Tuesday said it would supply two 350-MW steam turbines for installation at two large-scale coal-fired thermal plants in Morocco planned by Jorf Lasfar Energy Co., a power plant company owned by Abu Dhabi National Energy Co. (TAQA).

The 900-MW Hatfield power project, one of the UK’s first carbon capture and storage (CCS) coal-fired projects, was revived on Monday with the purchase of Powerfuel Power Ltd. by 2Co Energy, a new company backed by private equity fund firm TPG Capital. The project has now been renamed Don Valley Power Project, and it is set to begin operations between 2015 and 2016, capturing and storing up to 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year under the seabed of the North Sea.

Dominion plans to shutter two of the four units at Salem Harbor Power Station by the end of this year, and it will close the entire plant in Salem, Mass., by June 2014 because “pending environmental regulations and market conditions are making the power station uneconomical to operate,” the company announced today. The news comes on the heels of the announced closure of Dominion’s State Line Power Plant in Hammond, Ind.

Two newly built reactors reached important milestones in the past week. Reports say the second unit of the Ling Ao phase II nuclear plant in China’s Guangdong Province was connected to the grid on May 3, while Russian state-owned Atomstroyexport said Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant achieved criticality on May 8 and is now functioning at the minimum controlled power level.