If broad policy commitments announced by various countries are implemented, coal will not only lose its rank as the dominant fuel for power generation to renewables by 2040, but the world’s coal fleet will be significantly transformed by technology advances, the International Energy Agency’s (IEA’s) newly released World Energy Outlook (WEO-2016) forecasts. Under a baseline […]

Barely a year after Mexico launched a wholesale market with retail competition as part of a wide-scale reform of its power sector, the country has managed to implement a transparent system that is attracting investment. Mexico has also expanded its grid and deployed notable amounts of renewables that are producing power at unprecedented low prices, […]

Difficult market conditions have accelerated the much-hyped closures of a string of coal-fired power units in the U.S., but the phenomenon is extending overseas, gripping plants in Australia and Germany. In the wake of the Paris agreement in December 2015, a number of governments have moved to phase out coal-fired generation. This October, France, which […]

Japanese Firms Poised to Build Two 540-MW IGCC Plants Based on Nakoso Technology. A consortium of Japanese firms on December 1 said they had received full-turnkey orders for two integrated gasification

Just a few months ago, New England’s biggest and most controversial pipeline proposal, Algonquin Gas Transmission’s Access Northeast project (see “Securing Pipeline Infrastructure for Gas-Fired Generation in New England” in the July 2016 issue), was poised for regulatory scrutiny. Access Northeast distinguished itself by its partnership with electric distribution companies (EDCs), namely National Grid and […]

As our January 2017 cover image of a dynamic Rubik’s Cube suggests, the power industry, especially in the U.S., is dealing with something akin to solving a 3-D puzzle whose pieces are being added and subtracted as the game is being played. Although shares of traditional, regulated electric utilities remain some of the most predictable […]

The U.S. market for electricity is trifurcated. More than half the country is served by competitive generators bidding against each other in wholesale markets. Almost half is served by conventional state-regulated, vertically integrated utilities controlling generation and transmission. The rest, a much smaller portion, consists of government-owned and customer-owned utilities, some of which are generators […]

The Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) launched its 51st State Initiative in 2014 with a simple question: What if there were no predefined electricity market? No rules. No market designs. No policies. No subsidies for any type of energy resource. Just a grid to deliver electric power from a variety of sources. And customers. Plenty […]

Just as the election of Donald J. Trump could result in redirected energy policy in the U.S., 2017 elections in France and Germany could reshape plans for electricity infrastructure on the European continent. Also on both continents, some factors and trends will be out of elected officials’ control. “Difficult to see. Always in motion is […]

A digital roundtable with four senior members of diverse generating companies reveals that regulations aren’t the top concern at the moment. Instead, decisions are being driven both by customer desires and

Oregon State University’s Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center was awarded up to $40 million by the DOE to create a wave energy test facility in Newport.

In a joint statement on December 20, the leaders of the United States and Canada announced that they had developed a new partnership that effectively bans additional licenses for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and parts of the Atlantic Ocean.

President-elect Donald Trump has picked former Texas governor Rick Perry to be his energy secretary

[Note: This article first appeared online on November 1.] The discovery of widespread carbon segregation problems in critical nuclear plant components has crippled the French power industry—20 of the country’s 58 reactors are currently offline and under heavy scrutiny. France’s nuclear safety chairman said more anomalies “will likely be found,” as the extent of the contagion […]

Owner/operator: Pattern Energy Just as Seattle’s Amazon.com jumpstarted the online shopping trend, it’s now part of another trend that has major corporations owning or contracting for sizable grid-connected renewable power facilities. A new wind farm in rural Indiana is part of that story. Cloud computing is big business, and it’s growing as fast as cumulous […]

Owner/operator: Ethiopian Electric Power Corp. Building the 1,870-MW Gibe III hydroelectric project required unprecedented solutions that took into account the remoteness of the site, the narrow gorge where the dam is located, the height of the dam, and challenges in sourcing reliable materials. Split almost diagonally by the East African Rift System, Ethiopia is a […]

Owner/operator: Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County/Babcock & Wilcox Co. Although waste-to-energy (WTE) technology is well proven, the relatively low cost of landfilling garbage in the U.S. has foiled new power plant construction for many years. However, a facility in Florida—the first greenfield WTE project the U.S. has seen in 20 years—shows it’s still […]

Owner/operator: Akca Enerji Geothermal energy has long been handicapped by its need for high-temperature resources to generate economic power, but innovations in binary Organic Rankine Cycle systems are making it possible to exploit low-temperature sites. An innovative plant in Turkey using Italian technology has taken things a step further with a unique two-pressure, multistage, single-disk […]

Owner/operator: Korea South East Power Co., Ltd. Few people would view a large coal plant as a place to generate renewable energy. But a Korean utility took a chance on an innovative approach, harnessing the latent energy of the plant’s cooling effluent to drive a trio of hydroelectric plants, and in so doing, created a […]

Public utility commissioners matter. A lot. Now more than ever, these state regulators are charged with looking out for the best interests of utility customers in states that have regulated electric and other utilities. As we’ve seen from countless recent news stories, public utility commissions (PUCs) play a significant role in determining what power system […]

Pneumatic furnace damper drives may be more common, but electro-hydraulic actuators provide several advantages to the more traditional control scheme. One fossil-fired plant in Taiwan achieved more consistent and accurate furnace draft pressure control by retrofitting its dampers with Electraulic actuators, optimizing combustion and increasing boiler availability in the process. Fossil fuel–fired power plants worldwide […]

China’s Sichuan provincial government has moved to restrict construction of small and medium hydropower projects between 2016 and 2020 in an effort to improve grid planning and efficiency. Policy proposals posted on the Sichuan government’s website in October seek to prohibit small-scale hydropower projects and limit medium-sized plants over the next five years. Reuters reported […]

The ocean power sector is still in its early stages of development, shackled by high development and operational costs. Trends emerging over the past two years hint at which technologies could dominate the sector’s future. Despite decades of research and development that have yielded several innovative ways of using oceans to fuel power generation, the […]

In a rare intervention, the United Nations’ (UN’s) heritage conservation arm is urging Bangladesh to relocate a proposed 1,320-MW coal-fired power plant because it poses a serious threat to one of the world’s largest mangrove forests. Bangladesh-India Friendship Power Co. Ltd. (BIFPCL)—a joint venture of the Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB) and India’s largest power […]

Ontario—Canada’s most populous province and its major economic engine—has an electric power supply system so driven by provincial politics that it has pushed the province’s utility generating arm, Ontario Power Generation, into what appear to be incoherent resource policies. Late last September, in a stunning announcement, the Canadian province of Ontario’s Energy Ministry said it […]

A 52.5-MW solar photovoltaic (PV) plant commissioned this October in Jordan will generate about 1% of the Middle Eastern nation’s power (Figure 5). 5. Solar carpet. The 52.5-MW Shams Ma’an Solar Power Plant in Jordan was commissioned this October. Courtesy: Business Wire The plant uses more than 600,000 Series 4 thin-film modules manufactured by Arizona-headquartered […]

God forbid that you have a job that requires you to read the orders issued by public utility commissions (PUCs). As a regulator, I not only have to read them—I have to write them. And even I marvel at the arcane, trial-like proceedings of PUCs and the orders that emerge from them, which are the […]

The entire state of South Australia suffered a blackout on the afternoon of September 28. The cause of the event has been disputed, but it has left Australians in a raging debate about the state of the country’s electricity system and policies that will shape its future power mix. The so-called “Black System” event that […]

As energy storage becomes more ubiquitous and projects grow in size and capacity, utilities of all types are exploring the best ways of putting it to use across the grid. The opportunities are large, but so are the challenges, according to a panel of executives who spoke at Energy Storage North America in October. New […]

Refurbishment of OPG’s Darlington Units Begins. Work to refurbish Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG’s) 3.5-GW Darlington Nuclear Generating Station kicked off on October 15. The refurbishment of the four Darlington reactors, which have provided about 20% of Ontario’s power since they went into service in the early 1990s, will span 10 years. The project is estimated […]