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By 2008, the 19-year-old wood-fired Rio Bravo Rocklin Power Station’s operating performance had been significantly degraded by boiler erosion and corrosion caused by (among many other problems) poor fuel. After much consideration, the plant owners elected to invest in a comprehensive upgrade to restore the plant to its as-built performance. Today, the plant operates very reliably. A newly implemented predictive maintenance program should continue to drive down operating costs and further reduce the number of forced outages.

Renewable Generation in North America

For decades, the solar energy industry has struggled to become cost-competitive with other sources of power generation. Recent technology innovations and creative ways of installing solar generation are beginning to enable solar power to increase its share of the electricity market.

Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) deliberately induce seismicity — earthquakes — in order to access hot, subsurface rocks for use in geothermal power generation. Recent quakes around the world have frightened those living near EGS sites and sparked controversy over the technique. We asked experts to provide EGS technical details and to evaluate the seismic risk the process poses.

The new Wachs EP 424 with the new Speed Prep feed system is a precision I.D.-mount end-prep machine tool designed to bevel, compound-bevel, J-prep, face, and counterbore pipe, fittings, and valves. The system uses a new Wachs mechanism that feeds simultaneously in the axial and radial planes. Wachs claims that the system is able to […]

As director of public policy analysis in my last seven years at Enron, I participated in many legislative and regulatory debates involving electricity, although the public policy thrust of the company was the opposite of what I believed. While I favored free markets, the business model of Ken Lay (a PhD economist with years of Washington regulatory experience) centered on special government favor. Enron, for example, had seven profit centers geared to government pricing/rationing of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. And in the 1990s, the company was squarely behind a Btu tax. Today, Enron would be pushing cap and trade.

This September, as Siemens Energy wrapped up testing of its H-class SGT5-8000H gas turbine at E.ON’s Irsching 4 gas power plant in Bavaria, Germany, the company raved about what it is calling "the world’s most powerful gas turbine."

News items of interest to power industry professionals.

A fiberglass-reinforced plastic (FRP) Halar stack liner was installed at Vattenfall’s 300-MW Unit 2 at the Nordjylland Power Station in 1995. The 112-meter-high (367-ft) stack, protected from corrosion by the ECTFE liner, is still in excellent condition and has not required any repairs during more than 13 years of service. (ECTFE is short for ethylene chlorotrifluoroethlyene polymer, marketed under the brand name Halar ECTFE [Halar] by Solvay Solexis.)

The ATL-5000 — a new, fully automated water jet system from NLB Corp. — cleans tube bundles three times faster than manual methods and features an adjustable lance stroke that allows the system to be configured for bundles of various lengths, up to 30 feet. The diesel-powered system has five rigid lances, each with a […]