POWER

By Kennedy Maize The Obama administration has picked Steven Chu, currently the director of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be secretary of energy. The selection was quite a surprise, as Chu’s name had not surfaced in any of the rumors circulating in Washington. Indeed, he’s not well know in Washington political […]

In the past two days, numerous news outlets have reported that president-elect Barack Obama will nominate Nobel Prize winner Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to become the next secretary of energy. If he is officially announced and then confirmed, Chu will become the 12th individual to lead the Department of Energy. Do you remember the 11 who preceded him, starting in 1977?

By Kennedy Maize
The Obama administration has picked Steven Chu, currently the director of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be secretary of energy. The selection was quite a surprise, as Chu’s name had not surfaced in any of the rumors circulating in Washington. Indeed, he’s not well know in Washington political circles.

South Africa, reeling from a power crisis caused by a lack of generating capacity, on Friday canceled a plan to build a nuclear plant for about $12 billion, saying it was “not in a position to invest in nuclear.”

The U.S. Supreme Court last week heard oral arguments in Entergy v. EPA, a case that questions an appellate court decision that said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot conduct a cost-benefit analysis in regulating how power plants use cooling water from rivers and lakes. Power companies and the EPA—pitted against environmental groups led by […]

Alstom and Polish company PGE Elektrownia Belchatow S.A. on Monday announced they had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to develop and implement carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology at the 4,440-MW Belchatow power plant in Poland—Europe’s largest conventional power station. In the first phase of the Polish project, Alstom will design and construct a […]

Constellation Energy announced on Monday that its board of directors had authorized the company to begin talks with Électricité de France (EDF), following the French nuclear giant’s unsolicited proposal earlier last week to buy 50% of Constellation’s nuclear generation and operation business for $4.5 billion. The Baltimore company’s board had in mid-September approved an acquisition […]

American Electric Power (AEP) said last week it is evaluating the feasibility of building a multistate, extra-high-voltage transmission project—more than 1,000 miles long—across the Upper Midwest to support the development of renewable energy. The utility has proposed building the first 765-kV extra-high-voltage transmission lines (PDF) to connect major wind developments in the Dakotas and surrounding states […]

TransGas Development Systems LLC (TGDS) plans to build a coal-to-liquids plant in West Virginia, company officials announced yesterday during the West Virginia Energy Summit. The New York–based company filed a permit to build the $3 billion facility in Mingo County. Projected to be operational by 2013, the plant will be built in the region’s new […]

The Scottish government last week outlined criteria and officially launched the grand Saltire Prize Challenge, a marine energy innovation contest to unleash the region’s massive renewable energy potential.

By Kennedy Maize It’s time for the latest round of the name game, this time focusing on who President Elect Obama will pick to head the Department of Energy. Clearly, the the DOE pick is a second-level decision, after economics and national security. In fact, DOE really doesn’t have much to do with energy. Around […]

On the day after Thanksgiving, four federal agencies released a Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (Final PEIS) proposing to designate more than 6,000 miles of energy transport corridors on federal lands in 11 western states.

New ways of squeezing out greater efficiency from solar photovoltaic cells are emerging from computer simulations and lab tests conducted by a team of physicists and engineers at MIT.

The Marine Corps wants its base at Kaneohe Bay to become energy self-sufficient by 2015. One step toward that goal involves building a sizable solar power array around Kansas Tower Hill, which could be operating by next fall.

Power producers in politically unstable regions of the world are finding that generating capacity is useless unless they can ensure the reliable delivery of fuel to run their power plants. Such was the dark lesson in both Nigeria and Gaza in the past week.

Current U.S.-supported methane-recovery projects worldwide, when fully implemented, will deliver estimated annual emissions reductions of more than 24 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, tripling the reductions achieved in 2006.

A feasibility study released Nov. 27 by Ontario’s Bruce Power has concluded that nuclear energy could add 1,000 MW of electricity to the Saskatchewan power grid by 2020. The company considered three reactor designs during the feasibility study: Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.’s ACR-1000, Westinghouse’s AP1000, and Areva’s EPR.

On Nov. 25, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced that it had docketed, or accepted for review, a combined construction and operating license (COL) application for a new reactor at the Fermi site in Michigan. Detroit Edison’s application, submitted Sept. 18, is the 12th COL request the agency has accepted for review.

American Electric Power Co. said on Monday that a unit at one of its nuclear power plants damaged in September will not return to full service until 2010. The company also estimated the cost of repairing and replacing the damaged turbine rotors in Cook Nuclear Plant’s Unit 1 at up to $332 million. AEP figures to recover most of the cost through insurance and warranties.

Everyone knows that China is building coal-fired power plants at a furious rate in China, but less well-known are its construction projects abroad, including in India and Indonesia. And on Dec. 1, CIC Energy announced that it had selected China’s power station builder Shanghai Electric Group Co. Ltd. (SEC) to be the EPC contractor for a 1,320-MW power plant at its $3 billion Mmamabula coal mine and electricity generation plant in Botswana.

The Galapagos Islands, home of the unusual flora and fauna that inspired naturalist Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking work on evolution, are striving to promote clean energy that protects the area’s unique biodiversity. Part of that effort is the 2.4-MW San Cristobal Wind Project, which displaces diesel-powered electricity generation. This new energy source will cut greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the risk of devastating diesel-fuel tanker spills in a highly protected environment.

UniStar Nuclear Energy announced on Oct. 8 that it had awarded an AREVA-Bechtel Power Corp. consortium a multi-year contract to complete detailed design engineering for a proposed AREVA U.S. Evolutionary Power Reactor (U.S. EPR) adjacent to Constellation Energy’s Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power plant in Lusby, Md. The scope of work includes full plant specifications and […]

Geothermal energy projects are gaining steam in many parts of the western U.S., in large part because geothermal power has the advantage of being a renewable energy source that provides baseload power with no emissions and no waste by-products. One example of the latest developments in geothermal power generation is the recently completed 10-MW geothermal plant in rural Utah, which uses innovative modular power generation units.

News items of interest to power industry professionals. Economic slowdown delays Canadian IGCC plant, kills W.Va. coal-to-liquids plant. Canadian firm Alter NRG announced in late October that it would shift its corporate focus from internally led project development to technology sales, in response to the global economic slowdown and turbulent capital markets. Among the projects […]

Wind power is becoming a mainstream energy source that U.S. utilities are tapping into nationwide as a means of adding clean, domestically sourced energy to balance their generating portfolios. To identify where wind will take us,POWER’s senior editor talked to experts from diverse industry stakeholders about current and future developments.

For the power engineer, delivering an instantaneous and consistent power supply can be an elusive goal. Yet without it, grid frequency regulation is impossible. Today, frequency regulation is an ancillary service bought by the hour, the day prior to utilization, and dispensed on an as-needed basis by dispatch communiqués and provided by the ancillary service […]

The Steel Winds project in Lackawanna, New York, was selected as a POWER 2007 Top Plant because of its unusual location (a former steel mill and Superfund site) and because it was the first commercial deployment of the Clipper Windpower 2.5-MW turbine. That report was written just as the project entered commercial service but before a major gearbox problem was identified. For many new designs, it isn’t a question of if problems will occur but of how the manufacturer responds when problems inevitably do occur. For its handling of Liberty’s problem, Clipper Windpower gets an "A."

Courtesy: Platts Data source: Platts Energy Advantage and POWERmap. All rights reserved.

Call it the "trillion dollar conundrum." Really big money is needed to equip the U.S. transmission system to handle a variety of new requirements and increased load, but it isn’t clear how to raise it, spend it, or recover it. Expect new renewables projects to die on the vine until the gridlock loosens.

A new line of injection-molded flowmeters from Dakota Instruments, Polysulfone Meters, meet the performance demands of a wide variety of industry-specific applications, including air-sampling equipment, water treatment and distribution systems, photo processing equipment, aquaculture, and desalinization equipment. The easy-to-install flowmeters are manufactured of polysulfone, a heat-resistant thermoplastic material for good chemical resistance. Flow indications provide […]