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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.

News items of interest to power industry professionals.

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.

In June, California issued yet another report on renewable energy. This one, a joint effort of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and the California Energy Commission (CEC), analyzes implementation issues related to increasing the state’s renewables portfolio standard (RPS) to 33% by 2020. The report is the latest in an increasingly growing number of assessments, policy pronouncements, and administrative decisions examining renewable energy and climate change issues.

City Water, Light & Power (CWLP), the municipal utilities agency of the City of Springfield, Ill., determined that coal-fired generation was its best alternative for providing long-term reliable and economic electricity to the city’s residents. For negotiating an unprecedented agreement with the Sierra Club that allowed the project to move forward, for choosing the latest in coal-fired technology and air quality control systems as the foundation for the city’s comprehensive energy policy, and for assembling a tightly integrated team that completed the project well before the contractual deadline and under budget, CWLP’s Dallman 4 is awarded POWER magazine’s 2009 Plant of the Year award.

The Hague’s century-old power plant, now owned by E.ON, provides electricity to the local grid and thermal energy for the city’s district heating system. Poor performance from the plant’s 25-year-old equipment and The Hague’s wish to become a carbon-neutral city by 2010 gave birth to the idea of repowering the existing plant. For protecting a historic building while investing in low-emissions electricity generation, achieving improved plant efficiency and reliability, and accelerating the project so the plant could be back online for the next heating season, The Hague Repowering Project is the winner of POWER’s 2009 Marmaduke Award for excellence in O&M. The award is named for Marmaduke Surfaceblow, the fictional marine engineer and plant troubleshooter par excellence.

In 2007, Duke Energy’s W.H. Zimmer Station set out to advance the overall performance of its flue gas desulfurization (FGD) dewatering process. The plant implemented a variety of measures, including upgrading water-solids separation, improving polymer program effectiveness and reliability, optimizing treatment costs, reducing solid waste sent to the landfill, decreasing labor requirements, and maintaining septic-free conditions in clarifiers. The changes succeeded in greatly reducing solid waste generation and achieving total annual savings of over half a million dollars per year.

If a number of technical, financial, and regulatory hurdles can be overcome, power generated by integrated gasification combined-cycle technology could become an important source for U.S. utilities. Our overview presents diverse perspectives from three industry experts about what it will take to move this technology off the design table and into the field.

While many CO₂ removal technologies are being researched through laboratory and pilot-scale testing, an existing technology has a significant operating history at commercial-scale facilities, where it is collecting CO₂ from multiple sources, including low-CO₂ concentration flue gas (<3.1% by volume) with high oxygen concentrations (>13% by volume).

ASME’s latest revision of its Recommended Practices for the Prevention of Water Damage to Steam Turbines Used for Electric Power Generation: Fossil-Fuel Plants, ASME TDP-1-2006, contains much important design and operating advice that is proven to protect steam turbines. However, many in the industry are not as familiar with the update as they should be. This article provides a concise overview of this critical design standard.