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Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, trusts the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report’s conclusions that anthropogenic carbon emissions are the primary cause of climate change. When pressed, the customary response of Browner and other proponents has been to rely on that oft-cited list of 2,500 scientists said to have given their full support of the report’s conclusions. Browner should check her facts.

New York regulators in April approved construction of a 20-MW energy storage system at the site of an operating coal-fired power station near Union, Broome County. When operational, the $22.3 million project, owned by AES ES Westover LLC—an AES Corp. subsidiary—will use the technology to participate in New York’s growing day-ahead market for ancillary services and regulation.

After more than a decade of debate, in April, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved Cape Wind, a proposed 130-turbine offshore wind farm for Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts. It would be the first wind facility in U.S. waters. Despite remaining hurdles, the approval marks a shift in political winds for the nation’s fledgling industry, and it could spur further development of projects proposed for relatively shallow waters along the East Coast and in the Great Lakes.

One indication that the world’s offshore wind sector is poised to soar is the escalating competition between turbine makers. This April, General Electric (GE)—the world’s second-largest manufacturer of wind turbines—announced it would introduce a 4-MW gearless wind turbine (a design requiring no gearbox between turbine and generator) in 2012. The move directly challenges market leader Siemens Energy, of Germany, and its head-to-head competitor, Denmark’s Vestas Wind Systems.

Finland’s government in April approved two of three proposals for the construction of new nuclear reactors in an effort to rid the country of its dependency on electricity imports from other countries—especially Russia—as well as to decrease carbon emissions.

Growing water demand and reduced runoff due to drought has depleted waters feeding many hydroelectric power plants around the world—sometimes causing severe power shortages, such as in Brazil and New Zealand. The 2,080-MW Hoover Dam (Figure 4), a facility that generates power for more than a million people in Arizona, Nevada, and Southern California, is not immune to this phenomenon. According to a recent study by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Colorado River system, which includes Lake Powell and Lake Mead (both manmade reservoirs), is suffering a net deficit of nearly one million acre-feet of water per year.

Gas hydrate, a potentially immense energy resource, occurs at high saturations within reservoir-quality sands in the Gulf of Mexico, an expedition by the U.S. Department of Energy has discovered.

Soldiers could one day carry 600-W power plants on their backs, or set up arrays of up to 20 kW in streams deeper than 4 feet, if a prototype being developed by California-based Bourne Energy comes to fruition.

AES Secures PPA with Electricity Vietnam for 1,200-MW Coal Plant. AES Corp. subsidiary AES VCM Mong Duong Power Co. Ltd. in April signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with state power company Electricity Vietnam (EVN) for Mong Duong II, a proposed 1,200-MW coal-fired power plant. In support of this agreement, AES VCM has also entered […]

A recent trend in nuclear power plant upgrades has been the replacement of the motor-generator (MG) sets that drive the reactor circulating pumps with variable-frequency drives (VFD). Siemens’ first application of VFDs in this industry began in 2000 with an installation of six VFDs at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant. The use of the VFD continues to expand, and upgrades were recently completed at several U.S. plants, including the Hatch Nuclear Plant in Georgia.