Latest
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Legal & Regulatory
A Really Basic Checklist for Employee Benefits in Mergers and Acquisitions
As mergers and acquisitions in the power sector heat up again, questions arise about how employee benefits are affected by these complex business deals.
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Commentary
The Art of Ruthless Focus
A million possibilities and distractions are in the business environment. Tom Hall and Wally Bock, authors of the new book Ruthless Focus, say the companies that win in the long term are the ones that can drown out the background noise and keep dancing with the strategy that brought them to the party.
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Commentary
Double A Energy Policy
With climate legislation dead in the U.S., it is worthwhile to take a look at how discussions of energy and environmental policy ebb and flow in the country, generally without reaching serious resolution.
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Commentary
Stop "Doing" and Start Leading
A key challenge for new leaders is to make a transition from actually doing the work to making sure that the work gets done. That takes a mind shift.
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Distributed Energy
Smart Grid 2011: More than Meters
The concept of a smart grid may have been born in the U.S.A., but it’s hitting an adolescent growth spurt just about everywhere else first. Meanwhile, in the U.S., both the regulators and companies that see great potential in a smarter grid are realizing that making substantial smart grid progress will first require making both people and policies smarter. There’s one exception, one piece of the smart grid, that could face fewer obstacles to adoption, and that’s because it offers more obvious and visible benefits to its users: electric vehicles (EVs).
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Business
POWER Digest (Jan. 2011)
TANE and Shaw to Provide EPC Services for South Texas Expansion. Nuclear Innovation North America LLC (NINA), the nuclear development company jointly owned by NRG Energy and Toshiba Corp., on Nov. 29 announced that it awarded the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contract for South Texas Projects Units 3 and 4 to a restructured EPC […]
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Hydro
German Researchers Develop Cost-Efficient Small Hydro Plant
Researchers at Germany’s Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) claim to have developed a small-scale hydroelectric power plant that is capable of operating profitably even at modest dam heights while minimizing impact on waterways.
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News
My Top 10 Predictions for 2011
It’s time to pull my crystal ball out of storage, polish it up, and give you another round of U.S. industry predictions for 2011. I graded last year’s predictions B+ (for a complete rundown of how I graded each prediction, see page 32), but I’m convinced I’ll do better in 2011.
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Coal
IEA: Global Power Demand to Surge 2.2% Annually Through 2035
Though electricity generation has entered a key period of transition—as investment shifts to low-carbon technologies—world electricity demand is set to grow faster than any other “final form of energy,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) says in its latest annual World Energy Outlook.
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Hydro
Construction of Tibetan Dam Sets Off Cross-Border Tensions
China in mid-November embarked upon building the first massive hydropower project in Tibet, a 6 x 85-MW plant straddling the middle reaches of the mighty Yarlung Tsangpo River (Figure 2). According to the Hunan Daily, a Chinese state-owned enterprise, Sinohydro began damming the river in Shannan Prefecture, Tibet, on Nov. 8, kicking off the 7.9 billion yuan ($1.2 billion) “run of the river” project that is estimated to generate electricity for the surrounding region by 2014.