POWER
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Instrumentation & Controls
Air heater leakage: Worse than you think
Rotary regenerative air heaters capture and recycle about 60% of the heat energy exiting the boiler—energy that would otherwise go up the stack. For a 500-MW coal-fired plant, the recycled energy amounts to about 1.5 billion Btu per hour, and reusing it reduces fuel consumption by about 1,500 tons per day. Although most performance engineers […]
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Howdy . . . and welcome!
During the 17 years I’ve lived in Texas, I don’t know that I’ve actually heard anyone say, "Howdy!" but it seemed like the most appropriate word to associate POWER with its new headquarters in Houston. As you may have heard, POWER magazine and related properties were purchased by The TradeFair Group from McGraw-Hill on March […]
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Coal
Why new U.S. supercritical units should consider T/P92 piping
T/P92 is being heralded as a superior and lower-cost alternative to T/P91 for new power plants with pressures above 3,600 psi and temperatures above 1,100F—such as the supercritical and ultra-supercritical units proposed to be built in the U.S. over the next few years. The switch from T/P91 to T/P92 would represent the next step in […]
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Gas
Giant GE GT goes global
In late February, the largest gas turbine ever manufactured by GE Energy at its Belfort plant in France began a 30-day journey by land and sea that will take it to a new power plant in Spain. The Frame 9FB gas turbine—which is also the first built completely in Belfort—was loaded onto a special, wide-load […]
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Marmaduke
Marmy stops dreaming
Steve Elonka began chronicling the exploits of Marmaduke Surfaceblow—a six-foot-four, steel brush-mustached marine engineer with a foghorn voice—in the pages of POWER in 1948. That was the year that Marmy raised the wooden mast of the SS Asia Sun with the aid of two cobras and a case of Sandpaper Gin. This classic episode, written in the late 1960s, shows that even minor consequences of a steam turbine overhaul can cause problems. And as Marmaduke shows, solving any problem requires equal parts judgment, logic, and experience. Enjoy.
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Instrumentation & Controls
Siemens units keep pace
Earlier this February, Siemens Power Generation’s (SPG’s) factory in Berlin delivered its 500th gas turbine. The SGT5-4000F (Figure 2), formerly called the V94.3A, is nominally rated at 270 MW and weighs in at about 300 metric tons. With this shipment, the Berlin facility can boast of having built gas turbines with a cumulative capacity of […]
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Commentary
Economic dispatch done best when done locally
Both the states and the federal government are looking at who should decide which power plants are used at any given moment to meet demand. In question is which approach will reliably serve customers with the lowest-cost electricity. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct) raised the issue when it directed the Federal Energy Regulatory […]
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Nuclear
Monster moisture separators
Thermal Engineering International (TEI) (USA) Inc. (Santa Fe Springs, Calif.)—a subsidiary of Babcock Power Inc. (Danvers, Mass.)—recently shipped two of the largest pressure vessels in the company’s 90-year history. The pair of huge (13-ft-diameter, 110-ft-long) moisture separator reheaters (MSRs) were designed at corporate headquarters and built in TEI’s factory in Sapulpa, Okla. The 300-ton MSRs […]
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Coal
Big bucks for carbon sequestration
The California Energy Commission (CEC) recently awarded about $14 million for carbon sequestration projects to be overseen by the West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership. Westcarb, as the partnership is known, is part of the U.S. DOE’s effort to deploy technologies through its Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (RCSP) program. New members Alberta and British Columbia […]
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O&M
SWAT team helps shorten forced outage
Calpine Corp.’s South Point Energy Center in Mohave County, Ariz. (Figure 1) is a 520-MW natural gas-fired, combined-cycle facility with two Siemens Westinghouse 501FD gas turbines and one steam turbine-generator with a BB33 high-pressure (HP) section, a BB65 intermediate-pressure section (IP), and a 65CC intermediate/low-pressure (LP) section. The plant entered commercial service in June 2001. […]