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Lakeland Electric, the third-largest public power utility in Florida, reported that it saved $12 million in fiscal year 2015 through the use of a coal treatment at its McIntosh Power Plant Unit 3. The savings

The push for clean energy notwithstanding, no silver bullet can cure the challenges that our continued use of carbon engenders. Every form of energy production, green or black, clean or dirty, presents downsides. Siting an energy facility—whether clean energy, hydro, natural gas, coal or nuclear—inherently imposes some form of environmental harm. For renewables, one of […]

Owner/operator: Mátra Power Plant Co. Ltd. Hungary’s largest coal-fired power plant is a model of efficiency and environmental impact despite its 1960s-era vintage. Continual upgrades have kept the plant running smoothly, and a modern dense slurry ash-handling system keeps combustion residuals under control and allows for a zero liquid discharge posture. Unlike some of its […]

Owner/operator: NTPC Ltd. India’s state-owned generator NTPC operates a large fleet of power plants across the nation, and one of its top performers is found outside the capital of New Delhi. Staff at NTPC Dadri have taken a proactive, innovative approach to maintaining their plant, making it one of the most efficient in India despite […]

Owner/operator: Malakoff Corp. Bhd. Building a power plant on a site previously used for an aquaculture farm comes with more than a few challenges. For the Tanjung Bin Energy Power Plant, that meant some redesign and rework was required. Even so, the GE-led construction consortium made adjustments and delivered the state-of-the-art ultrasupercritical project on time […]

While it’s true that coal ash can be an environmental hazard if it’s not properly managed, there are a lot of positive uses for coal combustion products that actually provide benefits to the world. Many beneficial uses have been around for decades, but valuable new options are being developed, and some are starting to make […]

Like so many other power plant functions these days, regulatory and standards compliance can be automated. Know what you want an automated system to do before you make a vendor decision. As North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) enforcement deadlines and audit dates loom—notably, CIP-003-6 in April 2017, which addresses the […]

High-speed turbine rotor balancing was once rare because of the costs and logistical challenges involved in doing it during an outage. That’s begun to change as economic options emerge, and experience is showing that high-speed balancing can pay big dividends in reliability and maintenance costs. To a maintenance engineer or fleet manager, unwanted vibration in […]

South Africa’s state-owned utility faces recent generation shortages, plant construction problems, load shedding, and uncertainty at the African continent’s only nuclear power plant. And that’s just on the generation side. Moves on the business planning and regulatory side are painfully slow and could, some argue, be writing the utility’s obituary. Eskom, South Africa’s state-owned monopoly […]

When a gas turbine goes down, recovery can be an expensive, time-consuming process. Knowing what can go wrong and how to anticipate turbine failures can help you avoid a difficult unplanned outage. Gas-fired power is hot and getting hotter. The Energy Information Administration estimates that 2016 will be the first year ever that the U.S. […]