Business

RusHydro Inaugurates New Unit at Restored Sayano-Shushenskaya Hydropower Plant. RusHydro —a hydroelectricity company that is majority-owned by the Russian Federation—announced in mid-December that it had put its first brand new hydropower unit into commercial operation at its Sayano-Shushenskaya hydropower plant on the Yenisei River, near Sayanogorsk in the Republic of Khakassia. Following the catastrophic accident […]

Eliminating the negative and accentuating the positive in the workplace. Here’s the roadmap.

The Philippine Coal Plant Users’ Group (PCPUG), the leading nonprofit organization involved in generating electricity in the Philippines, recently held a conference introducing its mission and vision.

The EU has poured billions of dollars in support of the development of wind and solar projects over the past decade. Have the Europeans now lost their appetite for all things green?

A universal reality for U.S. power generation developers is the challenge of obtaining funding in today’s tight credit markets.

For the past 15 years, Vietnam has enjoyed enviable gross domestic product increases, averaging 7% annually. That kind of economic growth increases power demand, but financing new capacity remains a challenge. Reaching its ambitious capacity growth goals will require Vietnam to expand its financing and vendor base, attract foreign investment, and ensure future fuel supplies in a region thick with competition for those resources.

Planning for resource adequacy—something that was relatively simple in the context of vertically integrated utilities—continues to be a difficult issue in competitive electricity markets. Whereas state public utility commissions used to have exclusive authority to determine what generation needed to be built and when it was to be available, this responsibility has been assumed by RTO/ISOs in regions with competitive markets. Each region approaches resource planning differently, and each region faces unique problems.

Several new models of plug-in electric vehicles will enter the market in 2012, joining the Nissan LEAF and Chevrolet Volt. The Edison Electric Institute has prepared four suggestions to help utilities smoothly handle the introduction of these vehicles to roads and grids.

Progress Energy has adopted an emergency worker callout program that has eliminated manual dialing, improved work acceptance rates, and increased the speed of worker reporting. The standardized process also complies with union work rules that require equality in overtime opportunities, by seniority. The business case for automating the worker callout process is compelling.

ANDRITZ to Rebuild Oldest Egyptian Nile Dam. Austrian firm ANDRITZ HYDRO on Dec. 22 won a $138.4 million contract from the Egyptian Ministries of Energy and Water Resources for the supply and installation of four bulb turbines, generators, and the electrical and hydro-mechanical equipment to rebuild the Assiut barrage—the oldest dam in the Egyptian section […]