Features

Table 1. Change in furnace and air heater temperature as a function of the ratio of coal and gas fuel use in a typical steam plant. If natural gas supply prices fall below the delivered cost of coal, a unit

Many utilities have taken advantage of relatively low-cost natural gas to address environmental pressures and upgrade their power generation portfolio in one of three distinct ways—replace, repower, or

Cybersecurity awareness and best practices are increasingly central to the power generation, transmission, and distribution industry. Industrial cybersecurity concerns, recently heightened by awareness of how

Perhaps because the public has been more obsessed in recent years by cybersecurity breaches involving everything from social media accounts to classified military secrets, the amount of attention given to the

On Sept. 25, 2012, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a construction and operating license (COL) to General Electric-Hitachi Global Laser Enrichment LLC (GLE) for its uranium enrichment plant

When Gary Leonard, General Electric’s global technology director for aero-thermal and mechanical systems technologies, spoke with POWER Contributing Editor Mark Axford at this year’s Gulf Coast Power

P at Wood III —former head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Texas Public Utility Commission, and current consultant and non-executive chairman of Dynegy—addressed a packed house at the

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 Marmy 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 more than 50 years ago, reminds us that even the most modern steam plant is only as good as its operators.

Te Mihi Power Station is a two-unit 166-MW geothermal plant currently undergoing commissioning on New Zealand’s North Island. It replaces the Wairakei Power Station constructed in 1958—but with a much smaller environmental footprint. The double flash technology selected produces ~25% more power from the same amount of geothermal fluid that is currently used at Wairakei. For its continuing commitment to renewable geothermal energy, Contact Energy Ltd.’s Te Mihi Power Station is the winner of POWER’s 2013 Marmaduke Award for excellence in power plant problem-solving. The award is named for Marmaduke Surfaceblow, the fictional marine engineer and plant troubleshooter par excellence.

A municipal utility in the South may not be where you’d expect to find an exemplary smart grid implementation, but that’s just fine with EPB Chattanooga. Its leaders are raking in the kudos—including POWER’s 2013 Smart Grid Award—and their community is attracting new businesses in response to a fiber-optic-based system that has helped raise the profile of their city and bolster the sustainability of their utility.