Latest

Since the early 1860s, when French engineer and inventor Auguste Mouchout used a glass-enclosed cauldron, a polished parabolic dish, and the sun’s heat to produce steam for the first solar steam engine, solar thermal energy (STE) technology has come a long way. Today, an assorted range of technologies is in use or on-line — including […]

The generator bearings on a wind turbine located in Oregon (Figure 1) first failed in May 2006, only 11 months after the tower was brought on-line. The company that owns and operates the wind farm replaced the bearings and slip rings, but the new bearings failed only five months later. Once again, new bearings and […]

Opening of the 194-MW Lynn and Inner Dowsing wind farms built by UK energy company Centrica off the coast of Skegness, in Lincolnshire, this October made the UK the worldwide king of installed offshore wind capacity. The farms raise the total electricity generated from offshore wind in the UK to 590 MW, beating Denmark’s 423 […]

Italy’s largest energy company, Enel, is gearing up to build an innovative hydrogen-fueled combined-cycle power plant — the first of its kind in the world — in Fusina, near Venice, in the Veneto region of Italy. The €47 million plant is under construction at the site of Enel’s “Andrea Palladio” Fuina plant, a 960-MW coal-fired […]

Enbridge Inc., a Canadian pipeline and energy distribution and services company, and FuelCell Energy Inc. opened what they say is the “world’s first” direct fuel cell – energy recovery generation (DFC-ERG) power plant in Toronto, Ontario, this October. The innovative 2.2-MW project harvests high pressure that is used to channel natural gas over long distances […]

India is aggressively pursuing plans to expand — dramatically — its power generation capacity. In September and October, the nation inked lucrative deals to obtain nuclear technology from France and the U.S. Indian media speculated that the country was poised to increase its nuclear power capacity 15 times, to over 60,000 MW from the existing […]

The Bulgarian government this September announced the official launch of the Belene Nuclear Power Plant, a project it has billed one as of the largest in the European Union (EU). Valued at €4 billion, Belene is now facing funding issues — though the government, which deems the plant vital to the country’s energy and economic […]

An underdeveloped and costly CO2 capture technology, as well as regulatory and legal uncertainties over CO2 capture, injection, and storage, are the some of the more critical factors that impede carbon capture and storage (CCS) deployment in the U.S., the Government Accountability Office (GAO) — a congressional investigative arm — has reported. In its report, […]

UniStar Nuclear Energy announced on Oct. 8 that it had awarded an AREVA-Bechtel Power Corp. consortium a multi-year contract to complete detailed design engineering for a proposed AREVA U.S. Evolutionary Power Reactor (U.S. EPR) adjacent to Constellation Energy’s Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power plant in Lusby, Md. The scope of work includes full plant specifications and […]

News items of interest to power industry professionals. Economic slowdown delays Canadian IGCC plant, kills W.Va. coal-to-liquids plant. Canadian firm Alter NRG announced in late October that it would shift its corporate focus from internally led project development to technology sales, in response to the global economic slowdown and turbulent capital markets. Among the projects […]