Technology

The integration of intermittent renewable energy to power grids worldwide has meant there’s a need for technologies designed to support grid stability.

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

At the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, hosted by Sen. Dave McCormick at Carnegie Mellon University on July 15, 2025, Westinghouse Electric Co. put a live proof of concept on display: an artificial intelligence (AI) system aimed at reducing the cost and schedule risk of building new AP1000 reactors. According to Westinghouse, the demonstration […]

For nearly 25 years, KR Sridhar has argued that large electricity users should not have to wait for the grid to reach them. The proposition once sounded ahead of its time, then specialized, then useful to hospitals, campuses, retailers, telecom networks and data centers that wanted power close to the load. By 2025, as artificial […]

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

A South Korean power plant needed a coating that could survive corrosive condensates without sacrificing heat transfer—the industry’s usual workaround for that trade-off fell short.

POWER’s Rising Star Award focuses on individuals who have had a positive impact on the power generation sector early in their careers.

The DeBary Hydrogen Production Storage System, part of the DeBary power plant complex, is the winner of POWER’s Top Plant Award for hydrogen. It is the first facility in the U.S. to produce, store, and burn 100% green hydrogen for power generation.

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

Nuclear plants have accumulated decades of operating experience, technical research, regulatory guidance, and other industry knowledge. Finding the right information, however, can mean searching several separate systems and then piecing the relevant material together. To address that search burden, Atomic Canyon, a company developing artificial intelligence tools for the nuclear industry, built the Nuclear Industry […]

Last year an automotive parts manufacturer asked us for solar with battery storage on a 110-kW system. They were ready to buy the battery. We told them not to. Their half-hourly data showed a site that ran hard through the day and went almost dark by early evening. Solar would cover the daytime load directly. […]

Chile is among the countries that has undergone an energy transformation over the past several years.

A leading North American fuel cell manufacturer encountered a significant component challenge. The need was for a non-return valve that could ensure uncompromising safety, reliable performance, and consistent operational integrity in advanced fuel cell systems. Standard, off-the-shelf options did not meet strict requirements for low pressure drop, zero leakage, and material compatibility. WITT Gas Controls […]

  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 are connecting to the transmission system faster than the reliability rules were built to handle and behaving nothing like the passive load those rules assumed. Here’s what the North American Electric Reliability Corp.’s (NERC’s) Large Loads Action Plan, a new class of registered entity, and a hard 2026 deadline mean for anyone planning, […]

The Department of Energy (DOE) on Sept. 17 announced the Quantum Genesis Q Competition, a $215 million initiative to fund private-sector teams racing to build the world’s first fault-tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computer. Structured as a milestone-based competition rather than a conventional grant, it will pay out fixed awards of up to $1.5 million per […]

  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 […]

  Data centers commonly deploy looped medium-voltage (MV) distribution systems with automated protection and control schemes to deliver exceptionally high levels of power availability. However, these automation schemes rely on communications infrastructures where latency and scalability can affect fault-response performance. This paper presents a robust, hybrid FLISR strategy that integrates centralized and decentralized control to […]

I have spent my career building companies, and along the way I’ve learned that the technical mastery of a trade and the strategic discipline required to scale a business around it are two fundamentally different competencies. You can be the most capable operator in your field and still not have a business. A business is […]

A company that specializes in autonomous power deployment said it has raised $31.8 million to scale its operations. California-based Planted said the new capital expands its robotic fleet.

This article presents a practical four-phase engineering methodology for migrating legacy transmission substations toward adaptive protection architectures in power systems with high distributed energy resource (DER) penetration. Increasing DER integration introduces significant challenges to conventional protection schemes, including bidirectional power flow, dynamic fault current behavior, relay coordination complexity, and reduced protection reliability in aging substations. […]

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 […]

NextEra Energy says an artificial intelligence (AI)–driven dispatch and outage-scheduling tool has saved its customers more than $20 million so far this year. Santee Cooper expects a custom AI weather-forecasting model to help it avoid spot-market purchases that can cost $100,000 an hour during extreme weather. Both utilities say the tools moved from concept to […]

Utilities and independent power producers have spent years adding sensors to their generating fleets and creating dashboards to view what they relay. But visibility into how a plant is operating isn’t the same as knowing what to do about it—and that gap is where Siemens Energy’s Omnivise Energy Management System is increasingly shedding light, explained […]

Florida-headquartered ONE Nuclear Energy said the company has executed a binding letter of intent (LOI) that would provide site control for development of Project Cayman, a 2.88-GW gas-fired power plant and 700-MW/2.88 GWh battery energy storage system (BESS) sited alongside a data center complex.

Texas data center developer TIDAL PWR, which says it has seven projects totaling 9.87 GW in its artificial intelligence (AI) campus development pipeline and designs its campuses to combine utility service and behind-the-meter generation, is collaborating with quantum technology company BTQ Technologies to determine how power and data center infrastructure could eventually accommodate quantum computing […]