POWER

Mark Twain summed it up best when he described India more than a century ago as a place of “fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty.” Today, for all its surging economic growth, 300 million Indians still live below the poverty line.

When the housing bubble burst, it exposed an unseemly alliance between special interests and the financial sector. Activists wanted homes for all at any cost, and lenders were happy to oblige despite the inherent risk.

Confronted with a district court ultimatum that would have forced it to install expensive pollution controls or close two coal-fired units at its R.E. Burger Plant in Shadyside, Ohio, Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. announced in April that it would convert them to biomass. When the $200 million retrofit is complete, as is expected by 2013, the Burger Plant will likely be one of the largest biomass facilities in the U.S.

Recognizing that the long-term sunk cost, long project planning and construction timeframe, and high-risk portfolio make it difficult for private investors to raise funds whose maturity matches project completion dates, the Indian government has since 1991 allowed 100% foreign direct investment in the power sector.

Though solar thermal tower technology has been around since the 1970s, to date, only one plant in the world commercially generates electricity: Abengoa Solar’s 11-MW PS10 tower just outside Seville, in Spain’s Andalucía desert has been grid-connected since early 2007. Because the technology relies on heat from solar energy that is reflected by mirror arrays (heliostats) onto a tower-mounted receiver, installations tend to be site-specific, expensive, and high-maintenance.

President Barack Obama has praised Spain as a global leader in renewable electricity generation and has lauded its success at creating so-called "green jobs." However, a recent Spanish university study concluded that Spain’s mad rush to meet overly aggressive renewable standards has destroyed jobs and driven up the real cost of electricity, without cutting carbon emissions.

Barrages across the Solway Firth, Morecambe Bay, and the Mersey and Dee estuaries in the northwest UK could provide more than 5% of the nation’s electricity and meet half the region’s electricity, a study by engineers at the University of Liverpool has found.

News items of interest to power generation professionals.

U.S. scientists concerned about carbon dioxide (CO₂) leaks from sequestration attempts have been pursuing the option of natural chemical reactions within the earth to turn the carbon back into a solid, and they have identified an abundant supply of large rock formations around the world that could be used a vast sink for the heat-trapping gas.

By the end of this year, U.S. power plants with coal ash surface impoundments could face new federal regulations related to the management of coal ash at their facilities. Currently, there are no federal requirements governing coal ash management because in 2000 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined it to be a nonhazardous waste under the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.