Water

When commissioning a new power plant, requirements for purified water can be large—often more than an unfinished plant can supply. When it’s time to bring in outside help, proper planning can help avoid problems and keep budgets under control. With all the complexity inherent in the commissioning of a power plant, the last thing anyone […]

Droughts attributed to the El Niño phenomenon have gripped Venezuela’s neighbor Colombia. Bogotá in April prepared to ration power and instituted mandatory reductions in consumption, warning that

Oil-rich Venezuela is gripped by a power crisis so debilitating that the government has instituted four-hour daily blackouts across most of the country, forced hotels and malls to generate their own power, and

Hands down, 2015 was a record year for global investment in renewable energy. Excluding large hydroelectric projects, the amount of money committed to renewables rose 5%, to $285.9 billion, exceeding the previous record of $278.5 billion reached in 2011.

Keeping a power plant’s surface condenser in proper working order requires paying attention to balance-of-plant systems as well. Failure to monitor and maintain cooling towers and vacuum pumps in particular can lead to performance penalties or worse. The surface condenser at a power plant has a significant effect on power generation—specifically, the efficiency with which […]

By an 85-12 vote, the U.S. Senate passed the first comprehensive energy bill in nearly a decade, bringing a successful conclusion to months of legislative effort and overcoming a series of roadblocks in the full Senate related to the water quality crisis in Flint, Mich. The product of more than a year of bipartisan work […]

Subcommittees of the U.S House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate separately advanced appropriations bills that lay out funding priorities for the Department of Energy (DOE) and other energy-related measures for 2017. The House Energy and Water Subcommittee, a panel of the Appropriations Committee, passed a $37.4 billion bill to fund the DOE as well […]

Entergy Tests Fiber Optic Cables to Slash Copper Use A unique pilot under way at a substation in New Orleans, La., uses fiber optic cables in a way that could help utilities reduce the use of copper wire. But

Two environmental groups on March 22 filed a notice of intent to sue Florida Power & Light (FPL) in federal court over leaks from the utility’s Turkey Point Nuclear Plant south of Miami that have raised concerns about contamination of area drinking water. The problems began several years ago, after FPL completed an uprate at Turkey […]

It’s been five years since the Great Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami prompted a crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, but the world’s nuclear power sector is still lurching from its aftershocks. The Crisis at Daiichi Endures Five years ago, nearly a day after the 3-minute, 9.0-magnitude Great Tohoku Earthquake struck northeastern Japan—and unleashed […]