Understanding Coal Power Plant Heat Rate and Efficiency Proposed U.S. standards for reducing carbon emissions from existing coal-fired power plants rely heavily upon generation-side efficiency improvements. Fuel, operations, and plant design all affect the overall efficiency of a plant, as well as its carbon emissions. This review of… Read More
DOE Pulls the Plug on FutureGen The Department of Energy (DOE) announced on Feb. 3 that it was ending its involvement with the troubled FutureGen 2.0 clean coal project, concluding that it had run out of time to finish development before federal funding expires in September.… Read More
American Electric Power: A Coal Powerhouse Repositions Itself American Electric Power, one of the premier generating utilities in the U.S., is caught between a deregulated rock—wholesale competitive capacity markets that don’t, in the company’s opinion, value solid equipment over ephemeral demand response—and a regulatory hard place of increasing… Read More
MIT Study: Carbon Sequestration May Not Work as Advertised According to a study funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and conducted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers, a smaller portion of carbon dioxide (CO2) that is injected into the ground may be converted into… Read More
Scrubbing Coal Plant NOx Emissions with Electron Beams An unnamed power company and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have partnered to test a concept proven to work at a small scale that applies pulsed electron beam technology to slash coal plant nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide (NOx)… Read More
Operational Considerations When Burning Higher-Chlorine Coal An increasing supply of low-cost higher-chlorine coal is prompting many U.S. generators to give the fuel serious consideration in spite of its reputation for causing corrosion. Though corrosion can be a consideration, it’s not always caused simply by the fuel… Read More
