Technology

A magnetic level gage may be an excellent addition to a power plant boiler’s drum-level instrumentation. However, before any changes are made, owners must first understand the specific minimum requirements for water level instrumentation defined by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code. The code requires a functional water gage […]

Owner/operator: Rosenergoatom Fast-neutron reactors are pivotal to Russia’s ambitious nuclear power plans. The successful construction, grid-connection, and testing of the country’s first BN-800 reactor at its Beloyarsk nuclear plant is a major achievement in the right direction. Since the Soviet Union began its first experimental nuclear power projects in the 1940s, Russia has embraced nuclear’s […]

China is on an epic build-out of its nuclear generating capacity, and developing indigenous expertise and technology is central to that goal. The first completed plant leveraging the nation’s CPR-1000 design

Owner/operator: Exelon Generation and PSEG Nuclear/Exelon Generation When decision-makers choose to increase the maximum output of a nuclear power plant through an uprate, it sets in motion a process that can take many years and countless man-hours to complete. The success of Peach Bottom station’s extended power uprate project shows that all the long hours […]

Circulating fluidized bed (CFB) technology is taking a growing share of the international coal-fired power generation market, particularly in the Pacific Rim and China. Indigenous designs are also growing in

Compliance with one of the latest federal environmental regulations, the Effluent Limitations Guidelines (ELG), can be both costly and complicated. A newly available option offers features and capabilities that may make it a more attractive alternative than conventional approaches. In September 2015, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a new rule affecting flue gas […]

To power generation professionals, the word “cavitation” typically has negative connotations, but a new process offers a way to control this normally destructive effect and deploy it as a cost-effective life-extension technique. As operators of commercial nuclear energy facilities consider subsequent license renewals and life extensions, finding new ways to safely maintain reactor components remains […]

China, which continues to build more new coal plants than any other nation, is also on the forefront of deploying the most advanced coal plant technologies. However, these advanced units could face

As installed capacity in the U.S. continues its breakneck growth, the solar photovoltaic sector is poised for another leap forward with a variety of new technologies—if increasingly ill-suited regulations and rate designs can be updated to keep pace. The global solar market has moved beyond its early, uncertain days. The luxury of behaving like start-ups […]

FuelCell Energy and ExxonMobil will test a novel fuel cell carbon capture technology at a Southern Co. 2.7-GW coal- and gas-fired power plant in Alabama, the companies said on October 27. The technology under development by the companies uses carbonate fuel cells to concentrate and capture carbon dioxide streams from power plants. A pilot plant […]

Nuclear power’s future—and its much-needed contribution to U.S. decarbonization efforts—may be hampered if eight pressing issues aren’t addressed within the next five years, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said at a recent event held at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The issues Moniz outlined in his keynote speech at a six-hour event titled […]

In a major development for a novel carbon capture technology, developers are preparing to commission a 1-MWt oxy-fired pressurized fluidized bed combustion (oxy-PFBC) pilot test facility in Canada’s capital city, Ottawa. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and its Canadian counterpart, Natural Resources Canada, commemorated the facility’s construction and commissioning in a ribbon-cutting ceremony on October 18 […]

The Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) will award up to $80 million to a 10-MWe pilot project that seeks to advance the development and commercialization of supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) Brayton power cycles. The plant will be managed by three research entities: the Gas Technology Institute (GTI), Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), and […]

Academics at the University of Sheffield—a public research university in the UK—have begun two new carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, searching for cheaper methods of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil-fueled power plants. The work is being funded by the European Commission’s (EC’s) Horizon 2020 Low Carbon Energy program. Solvents Could Be Game-Changing The […]

Dreams of a future of round-the-clock dispatchable solar energy may have become reality at the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project in Nevada.

Security is taken very seriously at most power plants. Fences and other barriers are usually installed before construction of a plant even begins to keep curious busy-bodies, thieves, protestors, and—at the far end of the spectrum—saboteurs and terrorists out of sensitive locations. Some plants have dedicated security staff patrolling areas both inside and outside of […]

Owner/operator: NTPC Ltd. India’s state-owned generator NTPC operates a large fleet of power plants across the nation, and one of its top performers is found outside the capital of New Delhi. Staff at NTPC Dadri have taken a proactive, innovative approach to maintaining their plant, making it one of the most efficient in India despite […]

Owner/operator: Malakoff Corp. Bhd. Building a power plant on a site previously used for an aquaculture farm comes with more than a few challenges. For the Tanjung Bin Energy Power Plant, that meant some redesign and rework was required. Even so, the GE-led construction consortium made adjustments and delivered the state-of-the-art ultrasupercritical project on time […]

While it’s true that coal ash can be an environmental hazard if it’s not properly managed, there are a lot of positive uses for coal combustion products that actually provide benefits to the world. Many beneficial uses have been around for decades, but valuable new options are being developed, and some are starting to make […]

Like so many other power plant functions these days, regulatory and standards compliance can be automated. Know what you want an automated system to do before you make a vendor decision. As North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) enforcement deadlines and audit dates loom—notably, CIP-003-6 in April 2017, which addresses the […]

High-speed turbine rotor balancing was once rare because of the costs and logistical challenges involved in doing it during an outage. That’s begun to change as economic options emerge, and experience is showing that high-speed balancing can pay big dividends in reliability and maintenance costs. To a maintenance engineer or fleet manager, unwanted vibration in […]

South Africa’s state-owned utility faces recent generation shortages, plant construction problems, load shedding, and uncertainty at the African continent’s only nuclear power plant. And that’s just on the generation side. Moves on the business planning and regulatory side are painfully slow and could, some argue, be writing the utility’s obituary. Eskom, South Africa’s state-owned monopoly […]

In a widely expected move, the Japanese government finally killed the ill-fated Monju breeder reactor project on September 21, but reasserted its faith in breeder reactor technology as a component of the nation’s future power mix. The Monju plant was an ambitious project that never came close to meeting its backers’ expectations. Launched in 1980, […]

Global resources of variable renewable energy—primarily wind and solar—despite breakneck growth over the past two decades, are beginning to run up against technological and policy limitations on further deployment, and future growth will depend on significant changes in policy and grid design, according to a new report. Released on September 20, Variable Renewable Energy Sources […]

The $23.8 billion Hinkley Point C nuclear project has received the UK government’s green light, but the country wants to ensure that project’s ownership cannot change without government agreement. After a “comprehensive review” of the project and a revised agreement with French power generator EDF, the UK Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial (DBEI) Strategy […]

After years of incremental advances, a variety of innovations both simple and exotic are promising to boost the output of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems as much as 30% over current technologies—if the market can be convinced to adopt them. The Dawn of SiC For a generation, silicon has been the go-to material for semiconductor substrates. […]

A strategy rolled out by the Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of the Interior (DOI) to enable 86 GW of offshore wind capacity in the U.S. by 2050 highlights a number of key hurdles, including those related to technology, regulations, the environment, and markets. The DOE’s and DOI’s September 9–released joint document, “National Offshore […]

Inexpensive natural gas, increased renewable energy utilization, and ever-tightening environmental regulations have limited the use of waste feedstocks for power generation. But while often dismissed out of hand, with proper planning and understanding of the market, power producers can realize benefits from waste-to-energy projects. It was a tropically hot day at the plant, and it […]

A new assessment tool developed by engineers at Oregon State University (OSU) could allow people, agencies, and communities interested in developing small-scale hydropower plants in remote places to easily and accurately assess whether a potential project would meet their current and future energy needs. The free, open-source computer modeling package dubbed the Hydropower Potential Assessment […]

Danish firm DONG Energy has begun building one of the world’s first bioresource power plants that will produce electricity from household waste by using enzymes to convert the waste to biogas. The commercial 5-MW plant under construction in the UK city of Northwich could be commissioned in early 2017. It will use the company’s proprietary […]