Top Plant

I’ve developed something of a love/hate relationship with awards. Initially, it’s exciting to spot outstanding or unusual projects for our POWER awards, but over time, any number of things can happen to those plants, making them appear less than stellar. Sometimes it’s changing policy or market conditions that make a record-setting plant completely uneconomic (see […]

Düsseldorf’s new “Block Fortuna” at the Lausward Power Plant, owned by municipal utility Stadtwerke Düsseldorf, is setting records and giving Germany’s coal-fired power plants some much-needed competition for backing up the nation’s large percentage of variable renewable power. Germany’s Energiewende (literally, “energy turn”) functions as something of a living laboratory, where innovation equals survival, because […]

Lake Kivu, the 1,040-square-mile “killer lake” that stretches over the border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has long been a source of trepidation. Because it sits between two

Baranof Island is home to Sitka, Alaska. Located on the outer coast of Alaska’s Inside Passage, it is accessible only by air and sea (although once on the island, standard forms of transportation are

With its vast resources of oil, gas, coal, and tar sands—some of the largest in the world—the province of Alberta has long been known as Canada’s fuel tank. Coal- and gas-fired power has supplied the

Just how fast are things moving in solar? When we received the nomination for the massive Desert Sunlight Solar Farm in late April, the 550-MW facility was the largest solar power plant in the world, sharing

The Great Rift Valley is a massive continental fault system that runs 6,000 kilometers (km) from Mozambique to Jordan. In Kenya, the East African nation that is neatly halved by the equator, the Rift Valley is

From space, the 12.7-kilometer (km) Sihwa Lake tidal barrage that houses a 400-meter (m)-long tidal power plant looks like a delicate strand stretched across one of many bays and inlets characterizing the

You can’t spell C-S-P without S-P-A-I-N. Though there are now many nations with concentrating solar power (CSP) plants in operation, and nations with larger ones than Spain possesses, it’s difficult to

Begun with grand ambitions in the early 1980s, the second unit at Argentina’s Atucha site ran smack into the country’s economic crises in the following decade. But a determined crew brought the project to completion after a 13-year hiatus through a focus on rebuilding the nation’s nuclear labor force. As with many other nations in […]