POWER

There is an idea that has been around for a long time, at least since the fall of 1973: All that stands between the U.S. and an abundant energy future is a lack of spending on research and development. It is as though the Knights Templar could find the Holy Grail, if only the Pope would commit just a few more resources to the hunt.

Scuttling a high-profile “public nuisance” lawsuit, a federal appeals court has reversed a lower court ruling that required the Tennessee Valley Authority to accelerate plans to install pollution controls at four TVA coal-fired power plants to reduce the amount of pollution blowing into western North Carolina, saying the lower court decision could lead to other public nuisance suits that would wreak havoc on federal and state regulatory regimes for combating air pollution.

Saying they have “grave concerns” about the agency’s two-option proposal to regulate coal combustion ash, 31 members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have urged the Environmental Protection Agency to continue to regulate coal ash as a non-hazardous waste, saying an EPA proposal to designate it as a “special” hazardous waste eligible for reuse would lead to costly and unnecessary management and disposal requirements.

An Environmental Protection Agency proposal to tighten sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides limits in 31 states and the District of Columbia to address transported air pollution fails to give utilities and state air regulators sufficient time to develop rules and install controls, according to American Electric Power Co. Officials from the EPA and New Jersey-based Public Service Enterprise Group said utilities already had begun making investments to cut emissions and they believed the agency’s compliance schedule could be met.

Many claim that wind generation is beneficial because it reduces pollution emissions and does not emit carbon dioxide. This isn’t necessarily the case. When wind is introduced into a generation system that uses carbon technologies to back up the wind, it actually reduces the energy efficiency of the carbon technologies.

Every power engineer must have a firm grasp of the rudiments of how fuel is processed to produce electricity in a power generation facility. With this article, we conclude our three-part series on the essentials of recovering heat from flue gas to dry and process coal, with the goal of improving overall plant operating efficiency.

Progress Energy has incorporated online combustion optimization/tuning to eliminate furnace reducing atmospheres at its Asheville Plant. The optimization project utilized individual burner airflow measurement and continuous burner coal flow measurement to adjust burner air/fuel ratios. The result: significantly improved boiler combustion.

The EPA, determined to regulate U.S. carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act, found that the low limits set by the Act for any “regulated pollutant” led to, in the EPA’s words, “absurd” results. Undeterred, the EPA developed the “Tailoring Rule,” which reinterprets the Act to apply to only larger emissions sources. Texas eloquently rejected the EPA’s legal gymnastics.

Only 700 MW of wind power were added in the U.S. during the second quarter of 2010—a drop of 57% and 71% when compared to second quarter numbers from 2008 and 2009, respectively, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) reported last week.

New York state and Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) plan to sue Homer City Station, a 1,884-MW coal-fired power plant in Pennsylvania, for its alleged contributions of the region’s sulfur dioxide emissions.

The Department of Energy last week finalized a $117 million loan guarantee for a 30-MW Hawaiian wind power plant, and this week it said it would offer a $17.1 million loan guarantee to support construction of a 20-MW energy storage system using lithium-ion batteries.

California, New Mexico, and three Canadian provinces—partners of the Western Climate Initiative (WCI)—last week released a detailed plan for a regional cap-and-trade program to curb greenhouse gases (GHG) starting in January 2012. If the plan reaches fruition, it would be three times larger than a program under way in 10 eastern states.

Hawaii’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) last week denied a request by Hawaiian Electric Co. (HECO) to extend pilot testing for its advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) project to 5,000 more smart meter because of cost concerns. The move poses a major hurdle for the utility’s overall smart grid initiative.

Power plant operators, especially those located in countries with enforceable carbon emissions standards, are concerned about their CO₂ emissions. But for Helsingin Energia—which provides power, heating, and cooling for Helsinki, Finland’s 300,000 residents—the main concern is local warming, not global warming. In Helsinki, temperatures on midsummer afternoons only reach an average 21C, and for half the year daytime temperatures are below 10C.

Heise precision pressure instruments provide the high-accuracy measurements required for critical test, calibration, and process applications. The unique blend of product configurations includes the Heise 0.1% precision dial pressure gauge, the modular PTE-1 handheld calibrator, and high-accuracy digital pressure indicators and transducers. With ranges from 0.25 inches of water to 100,000 psi and accuracies to […]

Stacks at power generating stations may be low maintenance, but they are not no maintenance. The cost of preventing corrosion may be as little as $10,000, but the cost of repair or replacement could be many times that or even put your plant out of commission until the stack problem is corrected.

A proven solution for immediate and long-term job creation came from President Barack Obama and his administration earlier this year: investment in U.S. nuclear energy. Bulldozers in Georgia are already on the move and making preparations for expansion of a nuclear plant that has achieved several approvals, and long-awaited jobs in the skilled labor sector could materialize there within months.

In October of last year, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) issued a study finding that maintaining electric reliability will require significant acceleration in the siting and construction of new transmission lines. The NERC study is indicative of growing concerns that changes to the current transmission planning process are necessary to maintain reliability and accommodate interconnection of the massive amounts of renewable resources expected to come online over the next 10 to 20 years.

Luminant used remnants of the ill-fated Twin Oaks and Forest Grove plants (which were mothballed more than 30 years ago) to build the new two-unit 1,600-MW Oak Grove Plant. Though outfitted with equipment from those old plants, Oak Grove also sports an array of modern air quality control equipment and is the nation’s first 100% lignite-fired plant to adopt selective catalytic reduction for NO_x control and activated carbon sorbent injection technology to remove mercury. For melding two different steam generators into a single project, adopting a unique and efficient “push-pull” fuel delivery system, assembling a tightly integrated team that completed the project on time and within budget, and for completing what was started almost four decades ago, Oak Grove Power Plant is awarded POWER magazine’s 2010 Plant of the Year award.

With commercial operation of Madison Unit 3, Cleco Power now claims bragging rights for owning the largest 100% petroleum coke–fired circulating fluidized bed power plant in North America. For using readily available fuel in an environmentally attractive manner, adopting fuel-flexible combustion technology, balancing the utility’s generation portfolio, and adopting an innovative fuel-handling system design, Madison Unit 3 is the winner of POWER’s 2010 Marmaduke Award for excellence in operation and maintenance. The award is named for Marmaduke Surfaceblow, the fictional marine engineer and plant troubleshooter par excellence.

A national R&D program has been under way to develop materials technology for constructing boilers and turbines capable of operating at advanced ultrasupercritical steam conditions in pulverized coal plants. The large-scale, multiyear, joint government/industry project seeks to increase the efficiency of power plants by increasing their steam conditions up to 1,400F (760C) at 5,000 psi (35 MPa). The ongoing project has already identified the materials and processes for successful operation at these higher steam conditions.

The amount of air leaking into the boiler envelope is difficult to estimate. Traditional methods of measuring oxygen at the furnace exit and economizer exit do not account for all types of air leakage. By using molar calculations and total airflow measurement, a good approximation of the total air in-leakage rates of a boiler can be quickly determined using station instruments.

The cover of the July 5 special History Issue of TIME magazine features Thomas Edison holding a glowing bulb. A series of articles celebrate Edison’s many inventions and closes with this: “Edison’s laboratories were the forerunners of the interactive technological think tanks of Apple, Google, and Microsoft.” Though the sentiment lauds Edison, I think it’s an overstatement.

Catalysts used in selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems in utility boilers provide high NO_x removal efficiencies that routinely exceed 90%. A major co-benefit of applying SCR to coal-fired power plants is that the SCR catalyst also oxidizes the vapor phase mercury from an elemental form to a soluble ionic form, which can be readily captured in a downstream flue gas desulfurization process. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Cormetech have developed an advanced SCR catalyst technology with high mercury oxidation activity capable of achieving 95% oxidized mercury over a wide range of operating conditions.

In “Dry Injection of Trona for SO3 Control” (May 2010), NH4HSO4 is ammonium bisulfite. In the June “Focus on O&M,” the engines shown in Figure 6 each have eight cylinders. June’s “Competition for Offshore Turbine Market Heats Up” stated that drive or gearless turbines accounted for 14% of the world’s installed offshore capacity in 2009. […]

This May, following two years of construction, Siemens Energy put into operation Irsching 5, an 847-MW advanced combined-cycle power plant near Ingolstadt, Germany. The plant’s owner, Gemeinschaftskraftwerke Irsching GmbH—a joint venture of E.ON, Mainova, and HEAG Südhessische Energie—features two SGT5-4000F gas turbines, one SST5-5000 steam turbine, three hydrogen-cooled generators, electrical systems, and Siemens’ SPPA-T3000 instrumentation and control system.

The competitive push for more efficient power generation prompted the management of East Kentucky Power Cooperative’s Spurlock Station to provide training and to implement standardized work processes in order to achieve higher productivity. To that end, Spurlock’s management collaborated with salaried and hourly personnel to design and implement work process optimization. Two years later, their proactive, operations-driven culture is promoting continuous improvement at this facility.

Nearly a quarter-century after the Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster in Soviet Ukraine, Russia has been making deals with energy-starved nations all over the globe to help them build new nuclear power plants using Russian second-generation reactor technology.

Steve Elonka began chronicling the exploits of Marmaduke Surfaceblow—a six-foot-four marine engineer with a steel brush mustache and a foghorn voice—in POWER in 1948, when Marmaduke raised the wooden mast of the SS Asia Sun with the help of two cobras and a case of Sandpaper Gin. Marmy’s simple solutions to seemingly intractable plant problems remain timeless. This Classic Marmaduke story, originally published more than 50 years ago, illustrates that although solutions may be easy to identify, the challenge is often in the implementation. Sometimes a little horse sense is all that is necessary.

While the U.S. awaits congressional action on a cap-and-trade program that could possibly be limited to just the utility sector, Canada is moving, starting in 2011, to phase out older coal power plants and replace them with natural gas–fired plants. The announcement, made this June by Environment Minister Jim Prentice prior to the G8 and G20 summits, could have serious implications for coal-fired generators in the country.