Features

Is it possible to develop a business model whereby an economic dip can be used to a market advantage? One client uses a sports analogy to describe this opportunity: "We are between seasons, and we have an opportunity to recruit and retool our team for the future." This just might be the right time to retool your human resources processes to avoid past hiring mistakes and adopt new hiring practices that will maximize the life-cycle value of your company’s human capital.

The Hague’s century-old power plant, now owned by E.ON, provides electricity to the local grid and thermal energy for the city’s district heating system. Poor performance from the plant’s 25-year-old equipment and The Hague’s wish to become a carbon-neutral city by 2010 gave birth to the idea of repowering the existing plant. For protecting a historic building while investing in low-emissions electricity generation, achieving improved plant efficiency and reliability, and accelerating the project so the plant could be back online for the next heating season, The Hague Repowering Project is the winner of POWER’s 2009 Marmaduke Award for excellence in O&M. The award is named for Marmaduke Surfaceblow, the fictional marine engineer and plant troubleshooter par excellence.

In 2007, Duke Energy’s W.H. Zimmer Station set out to advance the overall performance of its flue gas desulfurization (FGD) dewatering process. The plant implemented a variety of measures, including upgrading water-solids separation, improving polymer program effectiveness and reliability, optimizing treatment costs, reducing solid waste sent to the landfill, decreasing labor requirements, and maintaining septic-free conditions in clarifiers. The changes succeeded in greatly reducing solid waste generation and achieving total annual savings of over half a million dollars per year.

If a number of technical, financial, and regulatory hurdles can be overcome, power generated by integrated gasification combined-cycle technology could become an important source for U.S. utilities. Our overview presents diverse perspectives from three industry experts about what it will take to move this technology off the design table and into the field.

While many CO₂ removal technologies are being researched through laboratory and pilot-scale testing, an existing technology has a significant operating history at commercial-scale facilities, where it is collecting CO₂ from multiple sources, including low-CO₂ concentration flue gas (<3.1% by volume) with high oxygen concentrations (>13% by volume).

ASME’s latest revision of its Recommended Practices for the Prevention of Water Damage to Steam Turbines Used for Electric Power Generation: Fossil-Fuel Plants, ASME TDP-1-2006, contains much important design and operating advice that is proven to protect steam turbines. However, many in the industry are not as familiar with the update as they should be. This article provides a concise overview of this critical design standard.

To supplement domestic natural gas supplies, the U.S. is expected to increase its dependence on offshore liquefied natural gas suppliers in the coming years. However, the composition and hydrocarbon content of imported LNG may significantly vary from those of North American sources. Variation in fuel composition may lead to plants using fuel that violates their combustion turbine fuel specifications and may cause operational problems.

Steve Elonka began chronicling the exploits of Marmaduke Surfaceblow — a six-foot-four marine engineer with a steel brush mustache and a foghorn voice — in POWER in 1948, when he raised the wooden mast of the SS Asia Sun with the help of two cobras and a case of Sandpaper Gin. Marmy’s simple solutions to seemingly intractable plant problems remain timeless. This Classic Marmaduke story, published 50 years ago, takes place during the Cold War at an Air Force Base in northern Greenland, where under-ice tunnels were constructed to move nuclear rockets around the facility unobserved. The miniature nuclear reactor was operated for almost three years before it was shut down and returned to the U.S., ending the Army’s nuclear program. Greenland officially became a separate county within the Kingdom of Denmark in 1953, and home rule was introduced in 1979.

The welding of dissimilar metal joints in new and retrofit power plant boiler tubing has long proved challenging. New plants designed to operate at higher temperatures and pressures require advanced alloys and a filler metal that produces reliable welds. EPRI recently developed and sponsored the commercialization of a new filler metal. Its first application is the fabrication of boiler tubes for American Electric Power’s ultrasupercritical John J. Turk, Jr. Power Plant.

The tension between the growing number of renewable energy projects and limited transmission capacity is reflected in Washington’s legislative agenda of establishing a national renewable portfolio standard and new transmission lines dedicated to moving renewable energy coast-to-coast. Even if those ideas become law, hurdles to the happy marriage of renewables and transmission remain.