In This Issue
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NewsIntelligent Cooling Tower System
Electro-Chemical Devices’ new plug-and-play Model 2122 Cooling Tower Control System (CTCS) is designed to apply the various chemicals used to prevent corrosion, scaling, and fouling in water-based wet cooling towers. The system also controls acid feed via pH monitoring, blowdown via conductivity, and the inhibitor via a user-selected time basis. Model 2122 CTCS features a […]
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Commentary
Carbon Offsets: Scam, Not Salvation
In the battle against climate change, most media attention has been paid to "cap-and-trade" schemes, under which countries set upper limits ("caps") on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and allow companies to sell ("trade") unused emissions rights to other firms. However, there is a second path to global warming salvation: Carbon offsets.
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EnvironmentalHelp Build the Global Energy Observatory
How would you like to be able to access data on all the power plants in the world and all of their performance metrics, analyze that data, and map it? Those abilities are part of the vision behind the Global Energy Observatory (GEO), an OpenModel website that serves as a wiki for global energy data.
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CoalRevived FutureGen Faces Renewed Funding Obstacles
A little more than a year after the Bush administration abruptly withdrew its support for the FutureGen project, the Department of Energy has again announced it will back the proposed Illinois gasified coal power plant and carbon capture initiative. Though the 275-MW project may be different in technical aspects — it will be initially designed for 60% carbon capture, not 90%, and gasify only Illinois Basin Coal (Figure 2) — it is still riddled with many of same funding problems. Making matters worse, it may have been revived too late: Since the DOE withdrew its support, several major carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects and alliances have sprouted in the U.S., and these could give FutureGen a run for its money.
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News
Politics Trump Scientific Integrity
In their recent endangerment finding draft technical support document (TSD), scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conclude that carbon dioxide emissions are a public health hazard and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Federal law requires that regulations be based on scientific information that is "accurate, clear, complete, and unbiased"; the most recent available; and collected by the "best available methods." The EPA’s TSD on carbon emissions violates all of these requirements.
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Coal
How Much Coal Does the U.S. Really Have?
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), a federal mapping agency, has of late been propounding the difference between "resources" and "reserves." It says that although the two terms are used interchangeably, the distinction is simple: Reserves are a subset of resources. Coal resources, as an example, include those in-place tonnage estimates determined by summing the volumes for identified and undiscovered deposits of coal, whereas coal reserves are those resources considered "economically producible" at the time of classification, even though extraction facilities are not in place and operative.
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CoalOf Fracking, Earthquakes, and Carbon Sequestration
Hydraulic fracturing — the process of drilling and then pumping fluid deep into a formation to generate fractures or cracks, typically for extracting natural gas from shale formations — has been under fire lately, owing to concerns that it contaminates drinking water. But while Congress debates proposed legislation that would impose new restrictions on the technology, an entirely different concern related to fracturing — or "fracking" — is emerging: It may trigger earthquakes.
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O&MThe 7,000-Foot Challenge
The Springerville Generating Station in Springerville, Ariz. (Unit 3 was POWER’s 2006 Plant of the Year), uses two lined ponds to hold water collected from its cooling towers. With the construction of Unit 4, the plant’s owner, Salt River Project (SRP), one of Arizona’s largest utilities, wanted to increase the capacity of pumps used to move effluent from one pond to another to avoid the possibility of overflow. SRP engineers wondered if using a vertical turbine pump on a floating barge would improve managing the water levels in the two ponds.
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WindFloating and Flying Wind Turbines
After months of preparation, Norway’s StatoilHydro and Germany’s Siemens in June erected the world’s first large-scale floating deepwater wind turbine some 7 miles offshore Karmøy, southeast Norway, on the 720-feet-deep waters of the Amoy Fjord. The developers are now gearing up to connect the Hywind turbine to the local grid, and it could begin producing power as early as mid-July.