Engineering

POWER’s 2026 Reinvention Award goes to Dominion Energy South Carolina’s Parr Station, where new dual-fuel turbines replace decades-old peaking units and extend a century-long pattern of reinvention at one

Restoring customer supply is not the same event as restoring a process plant. Sarnia’s 2003 outages show why power-system resilience has to be carried through safe shutdown, utilities, environmental controls, and staged restart. The Grid Event Was Only the First Failure State At 4:11 p.m. on Aug. 14, 2003, the Northeast blackout began to pull […]

A high-voltage insulator can look unchanged for years while its operating environment steadily alters the conditions on its surface. Salt carried inland from a coast, industrial residue, road dust, moisture, ultraviolet radiation, and repeated weather cycles create an exposure history that can influence electrical performance and maintenance demands long before an asset reaches a predetermined […]

Small modular reactors (SMRs) borrow steam turbine engineering from both coal-fired and nuclear plants, but the resulting “wet steam” problem, with exhaust moisture topping 15%, demands a fresh set of

As rental boiler programs expand across the industry, suppliers describe a shift from emergency-only stopgaps to planned capacity and redundancy strategy. When the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)

Moving Tasmania’s abundant renewable power to the mainland means threading a subsea and underground cable through farmland, coastline, and Victoria’s Latrobe Valley—each stretch carrying its own

Qatar’s strategic potable water storage has grown from about 2.5 days of supply to roughly 5.5 days, according to the Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation (KAHRAMAA). The utility credits a program of 15 concrete reservoirs linked by more than 600 kilometers (km) of large-diameter pipeline. The Water Mega Reservoirs Project, a finalist for POWER’s […]

A shorted rotor winding doesn’t care what year it is. Neither does a cracked retaining ring or a degraded stator insulation system. The physical mechanisms that take generators offline—fatigue

  Traditional magnetic induction-based instrument transformers have served the power industry reliably for decades, but a new generation of low-power alternatives is gaining ground — particularly in data centers and industrial facilities where accuracy, size, and integration with digital secondary systems matter. This paper reports on LPIT history, standardization, and some of the applications in […]

  Data centers face big challenges, from processing trillions of search queries, storing billions of emails and photos and serving countless hours of video every day while at the same time developing ways of decreasing their energy and carbon footprints and increasing data security. In this episode, Angad Sandhu, CTO of Giga Energy (director of […]

Artificial intelligence (AI) data centers are being built at an unprecedented pace. There are more than 12,000 active projects in the U.S. currently seeking grid interconnection representing 1,570 GW of generator capacity and 1,030 GW of energy storage. Analyst firm Omdia predicts that AI will drive more than 50% of installed power generation capacity over […]

As reciprocating engines/gensets assume a larger role in distributed generation, data center infrastructure, and other critical duty applications, crankcase ventilation and the resulting emissions warrant increased attention and mitigation. When power generation professionals discuss engine emissions, the conversation typically focuses on the exhaust stack. While this emphasis is justified, it underestimates another emissions pathway: the […]

North Carolina State University, the New York Power Authority (NYPA), and EPRI have demonstrated a megawatt-class solid-state transformer (SST) on a live 13.2-kV utility distribution feeder, marking what the partners describe as the first independent validation of a megawatt-class SST under real-world distribution conditions. The NC State-built prototype was connected at EPRI’s power delivery laboratory […]

California utility Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) on September 3 announced SHARE (Smart Home Assets for Reliability and Efficiency), a first-of-its-kind virtual power plant designed to help communities benefit from rising electric demand, while improving affordability and reliability for all customers. PG&E, together with Rewiring America, Google, Carrier Global Corporation, Tesla, Sunrun, Renew Home, Demand […]

Saeul 3 is the latest evolution of South Korea’s APR1400 program, completed after an extraordinary interruption in national nuclear policy, fortified during construction to address newer safety requirements

A widening gas turbine supply crunch has prompted Ansaldo Energia to explore a new path back into the U.S. generation market after more than 30 years. The Italian manufacturer will supply California-based

Australia Moves to Make Data Centers Bring Power. The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) has urged energy ministers to require large data centers connecting to the National Electricity Market to bring

America is debating data centers as though technological leadership and affordable electricity are competing goals. That framing misses the opportunity.

When I walk into the main office of a power plant, it’s always on the main TV screen, along with heat rate, load, and other critical numbers. I’m talking about condenser backpressure. Every power plant manager watches this number (Figure 1), and they should. A PEPSE (Performance Evaluation of Power System Efficiencies) analysis of a […]

Rising power costs and load increases have elevated energy monitoring and analysis on plant agendas, but consumption only becomes controllable once it is reliably measured per unit produced and modeled

Unprecedented scale and load volatility are pushing developers beyond traditional generation strategies toward integrated, digitally orchestrated power systems built for speed, stability, and resilience. As

Lower-emissions gas sourcing, efficient combined-cycle generation, and carbon capture-ready construction offer hyperscalers a way to meet data center power demands without compromising on emissions. As

Many simple-cycle gas turbines are running harder than they were ever intended to—yet steam retrofits have never penciled out for most of that fleet. Supercritical CO 2 bottoming cycles change the economics

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the domestic power system is facing mounting pressure from growing electricity demand, a backlog of generation interconnection requests, and an aging transmission

Triveni Turbine validated a complete 60-MW turbine-generator train—not just the turbine—inside its own factory, using a dynamometer to simulate real load conditions before the package ever reached its

Five advanced nuclear companies will build, own, and operate more than 20 commercial nuclear microreactors across five U.S. Army installations under the Janus Program, a milestone-based effort designed to place the first project into useful service by September 2028 and establish repeatable commercial products. In exclusive interviews, the selected companies told POWER they intend to use the […]

The U.S. Army has mobilized up to $2.2 billion for a five-year effort to build and operate more than 20 commercial nuclear microreactors across military installations, selecting five reactor developers and five initial sites for a program designed to push advanced nuclear systems beyond federal test programs and into sustained operation by a Sept. 30, […]

Wind turbine blade health strategies must get smarter to adequately support rapid advancements in turbine engineering. Over the last decade, global wind capacity has almost tripled. One of the keys to this growth story has been the sector’s ability to manufacture and deploy ever-larger wind turbines at pace. Today’s onshore models are, on average, three […]

A California-based fusion energy company announced it has reached an industry milestone. Fuse Energy Technologies Corp. on August 10 published a report noting the company set a record for the highest fusion neutron yield—1.27×10¹² in a single shot—by any commercial fusion company.

More than 3 GW of data center load left the PJM system on July 22, 2026, after a single transmission fault. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) investigated the same failure mode in 2024 and found that utility equipment shed none of it. Customer-side protection did all of it. Those settings are about to […]