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  • Salem Harbor Station to Swap Coal for Fast-Start Gas

    It’s official: The coal- and oil-fired Salem Harbor Station north of Boston, scheduled to be retired next year, will be replaced with a fast-ramping natural gas combined cycle plant. The four-unit, 720-MW plant, which was built on the site of an existing coal terminal in the 1940s, was sold by previous owner Dominion Resources to […]

  • New Executive Order Seeks to Increase Climate Resilience

    An executive order signed by President Obama today requires federal agencies to promote the “dual goals” of a greater resilience to climate change and a removal of barriers to carbon-curbing measures, including carbon sequestration. Climate change impacts that include “prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, more heavy downpours, an increase in wildfires, more severe droughts, permafrost thawing, […]

  • South Korea Ramps Up Nuclear Exports

    After decades of developing indigenous nuclear reactor technology, South Korea in 2010 voiced ambitions that entail exporting 80 nuclear reactors by 2030. In 2009, the country saw its first major deal, winning a lucrative $20.4 billion contract to build four APR-1400 reactors in the United Arab Emirates. That technology is an advanced version of the […]

  • POWER Digest November 2013

    RusHydro Completes First Stage of New Far East Hydro Project. The RusHydro Group on Oct. 3 announced it had officially completed the first stage of the 570-MW Ust’-Srednekanskaya hydropower plant on the

  • Study: Wind Power Curtailment More Cost-Efficient Than Storage

    A new study from Stanford University suggests that, if the overall amounts of fuel and electricity required to build and operate energy storage technologies are factored in, grid-scale batteries make sense for

  • First Megawatt-Scale Isothermal CAES Completion

    SustainX in September completed construction of what it says is the world’s first megawatt-scale isothermal compressed air energy storage (ICAES) system. The system at the company’s headquarters in

  • Giant Wind Power Sockets Installed in the North Sea

    A tremendous amount of offshore wind capacity—from 100 MW to 13,000 MW—is expected to play a major role in Germany’s transition to sourcing 80% of its power from renewables by 2050. However, Energiewende

  • France to Fund Nuclear Reduction with Carbon Tax

    Following the election of President Francois Hollande in 2012, France has engaged the public in a series of regional and web-based debates to pin down key tenets of its so-called “energy transition.” The

  • New Design Solves Scaling Problems on Geothermal Control Valves

    Scaling is one of the most frequently occurring problems in geothermal power plants and can prohibit the control of well flow if it builds in the well or wellhead. At HS Energy on the Reykjanes Peninsula in

  • South Korea Walks an Energy Tightrope

    South Korea, the world’s eighth-largest trading nation, whose trade volume has surpassed $1 trillion for two straight years, barely avoided blackouts between June and August this summer after the country’s