Marmaduke

Long-time POWER readers may remember Marmaduke Surfaceblow, a fictional character whose engineering escapades were brilliantly portrayed in hundreds of stories published within POWER magazine’s pages over more than 30 years beginning in 1948. Today, the story continues through Marmy’s granddaughter, Marnie, who is an engineering wiz in her own right. Marmaduke Surfaceblow was a crusty […]

When facing the unknown, power professionals must use their skills, draw from their experience, and think creatively. Marnie and Maya do just that while off the clock at Marnie’s high school reunion. “Hi

Steadily increasing demands leading to excessive cycling and starts/stops can cause heat rate loss, poor unit performance, and increased plant outages. See as Marnie and Maya demonstrate that even relatively

Small problems can lead to large impacts on a long-term basis. Heat rate surveys, improved instrumentation, and utilizing real-time monitoring and diagnostics can help recover plant efficiency and save money

When seeking answers to critical operations problems, consider that multiple root causes may be at play—thus requiring many different solutions. Watch as our heroines track down the culprits! As they trudged

Incessant trivial alarms can drown out important warnings and cause headaches for control room operators. In this installment of Marnie Surfaceblow, our fearless heroine wades through all the noise to identify

Marmaduke Surfaceblow was a crusty character, providing POWER magazine readers with imaginative tales of engineering feats, and lending his name to one of our most-coveted awards. He might be fictional, but Marmaduke Surfaceblow became synonymous with POWER magazine, a colorful character with a distinctive way of finding solutions to engineering problems. Author Stephen Elonka introduced […]

Power plants are, with good reason, almost universally regarded as fixed assets to be operated, maintained, and retired on the spot where they were built. The idea of relocating something as large and

Steve Elonka began chronicling the exploits of Marmaduke Surfaceblow—a six-foot-four marine engineer with a steel brush mustache and a foghorn voice—in POWER in 1948, when Marmy raised the wooden mast of the SS Asia Sun with the help of two cobras and a case of Sandpaper Gin. Marmy’s simple solutions to seemingly intractable plant problems remain timeless. This Classic Marmaduke story, published more than 50 years ago, reminds us that even the most modern steam plant is only as good as its operators.

Te Mihi Power Station is a two-unit 166-MW geothermal plant currently undergoing commissioning on New Zealand’s North Island. It replaces the Wairakei Power Station constructed in 1958—but with a much smaller environmental footprint. The double flash technology selected produces ~25% more power from the same amount of geothermal fluid that is currently used at Wairakei. For its continuing commitment to renewable geothermal energy, Contact Energy Ltd.’s Te Mihi Power Station is the winner of POWER’s 2013 Marmaduke Award for excellence in power plant problem-solving. The award is named for Marmaduke Surfaceblow, the fictional marine engineer and plant troubleshooter par excellence.