News

Despite recent regulatory reforms relieving the oil industry of certain federal requirements, many oil and gas companies, refineries, and pipeline facilities operating in California are not immune from state regulatory requirements, including some new regulations that become effective August 30, 2018. Even if companies think they are in compliance, they should check again to make […]

The James M. Barry Electric Generating Plant, both a coal-fired and natural gas-fired facility in Bucks, Alabama, sits on the west bank of the Mobile River. The facility’s coal is delivered via the river

The amount of electricity produced by gas-fired power generation has been increasing steadily in the U.S. for more than 25 years. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports that in 1990 about 372.8

An energy transition is underway across the world. Market upheaval, defining events, and recent policy changes have accelerated a shift away from coal toward renewables. Here is how this transformation played out for some of the world’s major economies over the past decade. Graphs show percent of each fuel source of total generation for that […]

In the next 25 years, the world will turn increasingly to renewables and natural gas to meet energy demand, turning away from coal, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA’s) World Energy

The project to build one of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery storage systems started out as a bet—on Twitter. Last March, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted to Australian billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes

News about the rate at which new renewable power capacity is being added to grids around the world has been overshadowed by a remarkable trend that could revolutionize the renewables sector. Over the past few

Construction Underway on New Unit at Serbian Coal Plant. It has been almost 30 years since any new power generation capacity was built in Serbia, but that stretch is coming to an end as China Machinery and

Iberdrola’s global strategy to close its remaining coal-fired power plants has met with government opposition in its home country of Spain. Days after Iberdrola, the country’s largest utility, said it

Unmanned aerial systems—drones—have quickly found their place in the power sector. But as the industry moves out of test cases and experiments, and into full implementation of drones, it is facing a whole

Eight northeastern states are again suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to force the agency to slash emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) blowing in from power plants and other sources in nine “upwind” Midwestern and southern states. The Ozone Transport Region, which was established by Congress under Section 184 of […]

Siemens claims to be paving the way for the next level of efficiency with the development of its HL-class gas turbine. In June 2017, the company announced it will validate the technology at Duke Energy’s Lincoln County site in North Carolina. Siemens is developing this class in an evolutionary development step derived from its proven […]

Olkiluoto 3, a much delayed first-of-its-kind EPR nuclear plant project under construction in Finland, has begun hot functional tests and should begin generating electricity in May 2019, according to Finnish utility Teollisuuden Voima Oyj (TVO). TVO on December 19 said hot functional tests underway at the reactor, which are part of commissioning, are expected to […]

Kansai Electric Power Co. (KEPCO) announced it will permanently close two older nuclear reactors in Japan, rather than invest nearly 100 billion yen ($900 million) to bring the units up to the country’s new safety regulations. Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) created new standards for the country’s nuclear plants after the meltdown at the Fukushima […]

We were standing in Volgodonsk, Russia, on a bridge that connected the third and fourth units of the Rostov Nuclear Power Plant (NPP). The fourth unit was under construction, and the deputy chief engineer of the Rostov NPP, Alexander Belyaev, told us that we were about to witness something unique. It was December 1, 2015, […]

Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) Chairman Stan Wise said his agency was “not going to make a decision to discontinue” construction of two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle, instead putting the decision squarely in the hands of Southern Co. and Georgia Power at the PSC’s December 21 meeting to determine the fate of the […]

Earlier this year, GE’s Power Services achieved a significant milestone with its 9EMax gas turbine upgrade solution. The 9EMax completed initial validation testing and was offered commercially to gas turbine customers around the globe. The first 9EMax unit was installed at a customer’s site in Asia. “First fire is a critical test where the gas […]

State regulators in Georgia have voted not to cancel the troubled nuclear expansion project at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant near Waynesboro, Georgia, and lead owner Georgia Power has agreed to a set of conditions that the utility must meet in order to continue the project. Georgia Power is one of four utilities with a […]

A bill backed by outgoing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) to subsidize the state’s nuclear power plants unanimously passed a joint committee on December 20 and now heads to the full legislature for a vote. S.3560, introduced on December 14, directs the Board of Public Utilities to issue Nuclear Diversity Certificates (NDCs) to nuclear power […]

The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) believes that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) needs to fast-track reform of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA), NARUC President John Betkoski III said in a December 18 letter to the commission. The letter pushes for FERC’s new Chairman, Kevin McIntyre, to make […]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering drafting a replacement of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The agency on December 18 published an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) soliciting comments from the public on how the replacement should look. The ANPRM is separate from the agency’s current effort to repeal the current rule. […]

A Michigan utility will build a $500 million natural gas-fired power plant on the site of an existing coal-fired plant in Lansing, and plans to retire the coal plant and another coal-fired facility in the town in the next few years. Lansing’s Board of Water & Light (BWL) announced the project December 18. The city-owned […]

A utility group on December 18 agreed to keep a coal-fired power plant in Colorado Springs, Colorado, open for at least a few more years, and its members said they are prepared to move forward with distributed generation and could import power to make up for the eventual retirement of the Martin Drake Power Plant. […]

Global coal demand fell nearly 2% in 2016, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Coal 2017 Analysis and Forecasts report, released December 18. “Demand for coal has now dropped by 4.2% since 2014, almost matching the fall of 1990-1992, which was the largest two-year decline recorded since the IEA started compiling statistics more than […]

A test plant that will be part of research into producing cleaner-burning coal for power plants is set to begin operation next year in Wyoming, with the company behind the project saying global demand for coal makes the project viable even as the U.S. reduces its reliance on coal for electricity production. Clean Coal Technologies […]

A leading-edge operations center opens in New York The New York Power Authority (NYPA) has taken a huge step forward in increasing the efficiency of its operations with the opening of its new Integrated Smart Operations Center (iSOC), which harnesses the capabilities of state-of-the-art digitization technologies. The center, located in White Plains, N.Y., was officially […]

Oman recently began operating a Wärtsilä-built power plant in the northern part of the country, part of more than $1 billion in power and energy projects being developed in the Arab nation. The Musandam Independent Power Project (IPP) is a 120-MW natural gas-fired plant (Figure 1) that can use light fuel oil as a secondary […]

A report released December 14 by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) says power generation from natural gas-fired units and renewable sources such as solar and wind will provide enough electricity to offset the closures of U.S. coal-fired and nuclear power plants in the next decade. The agency’s 10-year outlook, part of its 2017 […]

Supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) cycles—which are inching closer to commercial applications for waste heat recovery, concentrating solar power, nuclear, and fossil energy—offer higher thermal efficiencies and power density than conventional steam Rankine and Air Brayton cycles in use today for power generation. But to realize these potentially game-changing cycles, common challenges associated with turbomachinery must […]

The Georgia Public Service Commission on December 11 said it will decide December 21 whether to allow construction of two new nuclear reactors at the Plant Vogtle site to move forward, or call for the project to be canceled. Commissioners voted Monday to move up the timetable for a decision on the troubled nuclear project […]