Pistachio plant gives new meaning to green/Slightly sun-powered grill/Will lithium revolutionize hydrogen storage?/Calpine’s major Geysers geothermal upgrade/Rhone-Alps is French PV hot spot/Fuel cell–powered ice-resurfacing machine/Westinghouse proposes revised AP100 design/Sandia perfects solar alignment/SCE wants comprehensive coal study/POWER digest

Hydro-demolition speeds reactor dome entry;
Tips for keeping your unit stable;
Air makes heavy move a breeze

Congress’s enactment of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA) triggered a revolution in the development and construction of power plants. PURPA’s creation of an independent class of generators—qualifying facilities (QFs)—exposed a century-old economic myth that had justified restricting ownership of generating facilities to governmental and investor-owned utilities (IOUs). The success of QFs […]

It took Westar Energy eight years to upgrade the Lawrence Energy Center to burn Powder River Basin coal. Its zero lost-time accident record during the million-man-hour project is a testament to Westar’s commitment to workplace safety. Here’s your backstage pass to meet the PRB Coal Users’ Group 2006 Plant of the Year.

By design, combined HP-IP turbines have a small amount of internal leakage from the high-pressure turbine to the intermediate-pressure turbine. When turbines are new, the amount of this leakage is close to the design heat balance. But as turbines age, the leakage increases considerably, causing a heat rate penalty and possibly a reliability problem. In Part I, we explore the symptoms and causes of excessive leakage within GE steam turbines and how to correct the problem. Part II, in next month’s issue, will examine the same issues for Westinghouse and Allis-Chalmers turbines.

Scientific debate on the validity of global warming science continues, but the issue has yet had little impact on individuals. That impact is being negotiated in Washington, where a regulatory framework that would mandate reductions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is taking shape. Legislative options under consideration would redefine what power plants must do-and not do-to […]

There are often five stages to enacting major legislative reforms: Initial enthusiasm, a sobering recognition of the complex issues to be solved, excruciating negotiations over those issues, hand-to-hand combat with supporters of the status quo, and resignation that the final product only deals with part of the problem. Congress has reached Stage 2 as it considers a cap-and-trade system for reducing carbon emissions. Now the real work begins.

Keeping coal-fired steam plants running efficiently and cleanly is a daily struggle. An article in the February 2007 issue of POWER explained that one way to improve the combustion and emissions performance of a plant is to optimize the performance of its coal pulverizers. By adding a dynamic classifier to the pulverizers, you can better control coal particle sizing and fineness—and increase pulverizer capacity to boot.

The 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act require coal-fired power plants to reduce their emissions of the pollutant SO2. To do so, many have switched to, or are considering switching to, Powder River Basin (PRB) coal. Unfortunately, PRB coal has a tendency to leave excessive and tenacious deposits on boiler heat-exchange surfaces. Complicating the problem, the distribution of the deposits is far from uniform.

Synfuels’ political bubble has burst in Washington, but the market may step in where Congress fears to tread. When coal industry interests, in the form of the CTL Coalition, got a bill with strong federal support for coal-to-liquids technology before the Senate this spring, it appeared that the political skids were greased for some kind […]