POWER
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Legal & Regulatory
Best Practices for Aligning Safety Metrics, Incentives, and Performance
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires certain incidents to be recorded and reported, which generates a set of statistics that many companies use to gauge safety performance. However, other metrics may be better predictors. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires all employers with more than 10 employees, and whose establishments are not […]
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Distributed Energy
Air Force Fields World’s Largest Vehicle-to-Grid Demo
On Nov. 14 at Los Angeles Air Force Base, California (L.A. AFB), U.S. Air Force officials unveiled the Department of Defense’s (DOD’s) first nontactical vehicle fleet composed entirely of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). Actual rollout of the 42-vehicle fleet happened prior to the official ceremony, Christina Greer of the base’s Public Affairs office told POWER, […]
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Coal
American Electric Power: A Coal Powerhouse Repositions Itself
American Electric Power, one of the premier generating utilities in the U.S., is caught between a deregulated rock—wholesale competitive capacity markets that don’t, in the company’s opinion, value solid equipment over ephemeral demand response—and a regulatory hard place of increasing federal government rules that devalue on-the-ground coal-fired generation. Add the competitive challenge of cheap natural […]
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Commentary
Who Cares About Energy Efficiency?
Most readers will receive this issue while they are experiencing Northern Hemisphere winter, with its colder temperatures and higher energy bills, so it’s fitting that several articles address efficiency. You’ll find discussions of combined heat and power (CHP) as well as a refresher on the various ways to enhance thermal unit efficiency and thereby improve […]
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O&M
Operational Considerations When Burning Higher-Chlorine Coal
An increasing supply of low-cost higher-chlorine coal is prompting many U.S. generators to give the fuel serious consideration in spite of its reputation for causing corrosion. Though corrosion can be a consideration, it’s not always caused simply by the fuel switch. Understanding the various chemical interactions, as well as operational and emissions pros and cons, […]
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Legal & Regulatory
Mexico’s Electricity Sector Reform in Perspective
Much has been made recently of Mexico’s energy sector reforms, and because those reforms are still in being implemented, it can be useful to compare their progress with the outcome of previous reforms in Latin America. (A condensed version of this material appears in the January 2015 print issue of POWER: “Can Mexico’s Electricity Reform […]
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Renewables
The Outlook for Small Hydropower in China
As the global electric power industry continues to develop clean, high-quality energy capacity for sustainable development, the position of small hydropower has changed. In the past few decades, small hydropower development in China has experienced positive momentum, but there are still problems to be solved. To solve these problems, various relationships within the small hydropower […]
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Coal
The Urge to Merge, or Vice Versa?
The urge to merge, a key feature of the power industry for the past 20 years or so, showed no signs of slowing in 2014. Major players sought to beef up their asset portfolios and diversify their generating
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Nuclear
Small Modular Reactors Speaking in Foreign Tongues
Almost a year ago, workers began pouring concrete for the basemat of the first small modular reactor (SMR) in the western hemisphere. Despite the hype over SMRs in the U.S., with hundreds of millions of