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T. Boone Pickens has postponed plans for a multibillion-dollar project to build the world’s biggest wind farm in Texas, citing funding and transmission issues.

Duke Energy has filed testimony with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission for a proposed project that would store a portion of carbon dioxide emissions from its Edwardsport coal gasification power plant underground in southwest Indiana.

I was putting the finishing touches on this month’s editorial when I received an email from a reader who owns a company that serves the power industry. He was very complimentary of an article I recently wrote. "Goes without saying," I was thinking to myself. However, actually saying it goes a long way in my book, and I enjoy hearing from readers — at least most of the time.

News items of interest to power industry professionals.

Performing regular oil changes on remote generators is far from simple or cost-effective. Here’s how one firm harnessed technology to extend oil change intervals from one week to two months.

There has been much excitement about the advent of the "smart grid" recently, especially because of the strong push by the Obama administration. Despite the simple-sounding term, the smart grid is not a simple concept.

The debate over the benefits of using digital bus networks as the communications backbone of new power plants is all but settled. The technology is maturing, and the reliability of digital hardware is superior to that of hardwired systems. Newmont Gold Mining’s 200-MW TS Power Plant is perhaps the power industry’s best example of how a plantwide digital controls architecture can provide exceptional reliability and be significantly less costly to install.

Carbon emissions produced by the combustion of coal may be collected and stored in the future, but a better approach (in the near term at least) is to reduce the carbon produced through efficient combustion technologies. Increasing the efficiency of new plants using ultrasupercritical technology will net less carbon released per megawatt-hour using the world’s abundant coal reserves while producing electricity at the lowest possible cost.

At the opening ELECTRIC POWER 2009 plenary session, both the keynote speaker and the Power Industry Executive Roundtable participants kept circling back to the problems created by a public and lawmakers who seem to be promoting policies without an adequate understanding of energy realities. Most of the speakers acknowledged that the industry itself is partly to blame, but nobody offered a way forward.

Using nonhazardous waste for power generation is a trend that’s gaining steam for several reasons. Though there are several environmental reasons, another is the reliability of the fuel supply.