The Brooklyn Navy Yard Cogeneration facility supplies critical electricity and steam to New York City. Situated on an historic site, the plant has earned a series of awards and was the first cogeneration plant to be accepted into both the U.S. EPA National Environmental Performance Track and OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program in 2005. Through Delta Power’s unique asset management approach that brings added value to projects, BNYC has reinvented itself from a struggling, prematurely aging facility into one of the nation’s leading plants.

Commercial operation of PacifiCorp’s first new power plant in more than 20 years coincided with the company’s acquisition by MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company this past March. Currant Creek treads lightly on the environment, provides needed power to PacifiCorp’s eastern control area, and has demonstrated its commitment to be a good corporate citizen of the local community. By any account, Currant Creek is a model for how to develop a power project.

With the commercial debut of the first of six planned 470-MW turbines in December 2005, the time has come to pay homage to the sheer size (2,820 MW) and longevity (13 years and counting) of TEPCO’s Kannagawa Hydropower Plant. By the time Unit 2 is commissioned in 2010, and Units 3 through 6 go on-line "in and after 2016," two generations of engineers, technicians, and builders will have worked on the "pure" pumped-storage project since its inception. As if those stats weren’t impressive enough, Kannagawa marks the debut of "splitter runners" for pump-turbines. They increase the effective head of the plant to the highest in the world: 2,142 feet, at a flow of 135,000 gallons/second. That’s a very large pump-turbine, indeed.

It would be easy to dismiss Linden—which is powered by now-ubiquitous GE 7FA gas turbines and D11 steam turbines—as just another cookie-cutter combined-cycle plant. But its size (1,240 MW), key location near New York City, and use of reclaimed water for all cooling water needs makes Linden deserving of recognition as one of POWER’s Top Plants of 2006. Perhaps its most interesting story is how the project survived more than five years from groundbreaking to commissioning.

Why does Monticello, a 30-year-old plant, deserve recognition as one of POWER’s Top Plants of 2006? Because TXU has been blending Powder River Basin (PRB) coal with local lignite at the plant for the past decade, and steady reductions in air-pollutant emission rates have been the result. That positive experience has made the company confident enough to propose building nearly 9,100 MW of new coal- or lignite-fired capacity in Texas by 2010 at a cost of $10 billion. Read on to share some of the lessons that TXU has learned about handling PRB coal safely.

Richard Nixon was the master of the “big lie” in politics. Once, when his cronies expressed concern about some “liberal” statements he had made, he told them to “ignore what I say and watch what I do.” That insight into an elected representative’s true state of mind is as useful today as it was a […]

The pressure on power producers to supply reliable electricity is unyielding. Forced outages, which usually are caused by unexpected component failure or systemic problems, can prove very costly to both bottom line and reputation. To reduce the frequency and duration of unscheduled outages, many gencos are implementing comprehensive predictive maintenance (PdM) programs. Such is the […]

The Williamson Free School of Mechanical Trades near Philadelphia has been training power plant operations professionals for 112 years, and its graduates hold top positions at many major gencos, refineries, equipment suppliers, and design and construction companies. Testimonials indicate that it provides one of the best models for training tomorrow’s plant operators.

In April 2005, U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman asked the National Coal Council to develop a “report identifying the challenges and opportunities of more fully exploring our domestic coal resources to meet the nation’s future energy needs.” The council has responded with eight specific recommendations for developing and implementing advanced coal processing and combustion technologies to satisfy our unquenchable thirst for energy.

Participants in the CEO Roundtable at Electric Power 2006 raised a plethora of issues affecting decisions on future electric power generation. Representing a cross section of power producers, the industry leaders made clear that, although globalization has lost its luster in the power generation sector, its impact on the domestic industry remains profound. Ten years […]