Global Monitor

The past two years have seen a dramatic escalation of global natural gas liquefaction capacity.

A new project planned by RWE and partners Nexans, the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT), and Jülich is poised to mark another milestone for high-temperature superconductor (HTS) cable technology, which transports electricity without losses when cooled down to about –200C (–392F).

The first unit of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ (MHI’s) much-watched J-Series gas turbine, a technology MHI has been testing for a year, was shipped this December from its Takasago Machinery Works in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, for commercial use at Himeji Unit 2, also in Hyogo, owned by Kansai Electric Power Co.

Two identical 50-MW parabolic trough plants with thermal storage in Cadiz, in the south of Spain, began operating this January.

The ambitious Desertec project—a $9 billion initiative to develop, harness, and transmit 2,000 MW of renewable power from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe by 2050—has been trumped by a vaster concept that spans Asia and Australia.

RusHydro Inaugurates New Unit at Restored Sayano-Shushenskaya Hydropower Plant. RusHydro —a hydroelectricity company that is majority-owned by the Russian Federation—announced in mid-December that it had put its first brand new hydropower unit into commercial operation at its Sayano-Shushenskaya hydropower plant on the Yenisei River, near Sayanogorsk in the Republic of Khakassia. Following the catastrophic accident […]

ANDRITZ to Rebuild Oldest Egyptian Nile Dam. Austrian firm ANDRITZ HYDRO on Dec. 22 won a $138.4 million contract from the Egyptian Ministries of Energy and Water Resources for the supply and installation of four bulb turbines, generators, and the electrical and hydro-mechanical equipment to rebuild the Assiut barrage—the oldest dam in the Egyptian section […]

Of the $35.9 billion in loan guarantees awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) since 2009, roughly $26.5 billion have financed nuclear and renewable power projects across the nation through the Section 1703 and 1705 loan guarantee programs.

A consortium of European developers, with funding from the German federal government, have completed a power plant in Prenzlau, near Berlin, Germany, that uses excess wind energy to convert water into oxygen and hydrogen in a process called hydrolysis, and then uses hydrogen and biogas to generate power and heat.

Using nanoparticles of a copper compound to develop an inexpensive and durable high-powered battery electrode could be the breakthrough solution to the problem of sharp drop-offs in the output of wind and solar systems, scientists at Stanford University say.