Latest

  • THE BIG PICTURE [INFOGRAPHIC]: A Generation Freeze

    Before the polar vortex earlier this year, several severe cold weather events had presented comparable power generation operational challenges. POWER ranks those events here in terms of loss of generation capacity. Common themes observed in both severe and lesser cold weather incidents involve constraints on natural gas fuel supplies to generating plants, and generating unit […]

  • A U.S. Power Industry Regulatory Update

    The U.S. power sector has seen a number of developments on the regulatory front in recent months. Here’s where major federal rules stand today. (For a more dynamic and graphic version of this article, see http://powermag.com/long-form-stories/bw-power/ .) GHG Rules New Power Plants. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in September 2013 revised a 2012 proposal to […]

  • Non-Carbon Reagent Injection for MATS Compliance

    The upcoming implementation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) is putting pressure on coal-fired power plants to develop and implement compliance

  • A New Day for North American Hydropower?

    Can hydropower get some love? Even fans of renewable energy can be forgiven for having forgotten about a resource that—up to now—has produced more electricity than wind, solar, biomass, and all other

  • POWER Digest (October 2014)

    Kemper County Combined Cycle Unit Begins Commercial Operation. Mississippi Power on Aug. 14 marked a significant milestone and started commercial operation (on natural gas) of the combined cycle unit at the

  • Construction of Russia-China Pipeline Kicks Off

    Gazprom on Sept. 1 made the first weld of a 4,000-km natural gas pipeline that will run from gas production centers in Russia’s Yakutia and Irkutsk gas production fields to Russia’s Far Eastern regions

  • A New Record for the Longest Transmission Link

    A 7,100-MW±600-kV high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) line that runs 2,375 kilometers (km) from new hydropower plants on the Madeira River in the Amazon Basin to major load centers in southeastern Brazil

  • Poland Mulls Energy Future

    Resource-rich Poland’s push to prioritize coal as its main energy source and to cultivate a nuclear power program to boost energy security at the expense of climate objectives has provoked its portrayal

  • First Solar Reports Thin-Film PV Cell Breakthrough

    Arizona-based solar photovoltaic (PV) system provider First Solar in August said it had achieved a cadmium-telluride (CdTe) PV research cell conversion efficiency of 21%—a world record. The thin-film PV

  • MHI Develops High-Efficiency 2-MW Gas Engine

    Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) in August revealed that it had developed a 2-MW 16-cylinder high-speed gas engine that potentially offers a power generation efficiency (lower heating value) of more than