Business

China Inaugurates 660-kV DC Line. The China Power Grid Co. on Feb. 28 began transmitting power through a 660-kV direct current power transmission link that runs from northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Part of China’s west-east power transmission program, the 10.4 billion yuan (US$1.58 billion) project runs 1,333 kilometers through five provinces and regions […]

One of the main criticisms of renewable energy facilities is that they are unable to dispatch electricity when it’s needed. The great game-changer is low-cost energy storage, which would enable renewable energy production to be stored and rapidly released when needed. Here are seven promising distributed energy storage technologies that could be commercialized in the near future.

Part II of this three-part series moves up the typical utility organization to consider important fleet-level fossil plant operating metrics. This portion of the EUCG-sponsored benchmarking survey found that utilities favor fleet-level metrics that are similar to plant-level metrics but assign them different priority. Utilities generally agreed on what were important metrics in the eight categories examined, although none were favored by a majority of the surveyed utilities.

In the past, members of a utility’s engineering staff spent their career designing and building new power plants. Today, many utility engineers find that opportunity comes around only once in a career. To fill the experience gap, an “owner’s engineer” company can add to a utility’s team a cadre of highly qualified power engineers who focus on avoiding design errors and keeping the project on schedule.

The winter of 2010-2011 has been a cold one for financing renewable energy projects. That’s the weather report from a recent project financing meeting in New Orleans, a survey of developers and builders done by a large Minnesota construction company, and accounts from those in the financial trenches.

How does your company prepare and share fossil plant performance data? What data are important, and how much effort is required to collect and report the data? What are the most important statistics for reporting key fossil plant operations? The latest EUCG benchmarking survey reveals the favored fossil performance metrics at several of the largest utilities in eight key categories.

Don’t get fixated on the Environmental Protection Agency’s moves against carbon dioxide. The real action is in the area of conventional air pollutants.

As U.S. electric utilities watch increasing numbers of older workers leave the workforce, they are left with a shrinking pool of experienced personnel. To meet this growing challenge, a number of educational programs are being offered to help younger workers take advantage of career opportunities in the electric power industry.

While the cybersecurity threat escalates asymmetrically, federal agencies may be shortchanging cybersecurity while developing smart grid standards designed to protect the emerging smart grid from attack.

Critical minerals—such as rare earth metals—are important to many new energy technologies. However, the U.S. Department of Energy is concerned that foreign control of supply, particularly by China, could limit the ability of these technologies to develop fully, so the DOE is developing a strategy to keep the supply chain open. Meanwhile, some analysts say China is playing a losing game with its hold on the minerals.