POWER

Household batteries could contribute to making the grid more cost effective, reliable, resilient, and safe—if retail battery providers, utilities, and regulators can resolve delicate commercial, operational, and policy issues. The growth of battery storage in the power sector has attracted a great deal of attention in the industry and media. Much of that attention focuses […]

Increasingly, today’s electric power grids are interacting with microgrids and in more complex ways. Yet, much work needs to be done to integrate microgrids and flexible demand into the wide-area synchronous

Many combined cycle power plants are being operated as peaker plants, rather than as baseload units. That can pose a problem for economizer safety valves. Pilot-operated safety valves offer several advantages

Burning garbage to make electricity, or waste-to-energy, faces headwinds in the U.S., with low electricity prices, slowing demand for power, and local opponents that want to close or have closed plants. But a

A German power plant experienced premature wear and excessive seal corrosion in its boiler feed circuit and flue gas desulfurization slurry pumps. By upgrading the performance of the pump seals and

Early detection of increased temperatures helps avoid power distribution asset-related failures and unplanned shutdowns. Wireless technologies make implementing this predictive maintenance solution practical

Hydropower has evolved through multiple industrial revolutions. Today, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0 offer solutions to take the industry to a whole new level. Rules-based analysis

Wireless pressure gauges keep nine continuous emissions monitoring systems operating reliably, and wireless position monitoring helps close the loop on 90 control valves. Existing operations in power plants

The design of a power plant often revolves around efficiency and mapping out operations in a manner that decreases unnecessary expenditures, while increasing productivity. This challenge produces the need for

Are you properly quantifying and assessing the health of your plant’s transformers? Oil testing, infrared scanning, electrical testing, and inspection provide a much deeper understanding of what is happening

It’s no secret that the power industry workforce is aging and managers are struggling to find qualified candidates interested in filling open positions. In my April column, I referenced a

Proper valves, pipes, and fittings are important for the successful operation of power generation facilities. This equipment includes products with versatile designs to establish effective joining and sealing

Ansaldo Leads Research Initiative for Low-NOx High-Hydrogen Retrofit Solution. The Dutch government has awarded six partners—Ansaldo Thomassen, Delft University of Technology, OPRA Turbines, Vattenfall

Fifty years ago this July, NASA successfully landed men on the moon and safely returned them to Earth. In this year’s documentary about the mission, Apollo 11 , director Todd Douglas Miller draws on a

Swedish power company Vattenfall is testing a technology that stores energy in salt, with a goal of proving whether the process would be useful for storage of renewable energy such as from wind and solar

A blockchain pilot wrapped up by European transmission operator TenneT and storage solutions provider sonnen Group this May showed “tremendous potential” when used to network decentralized home storage

The first solar power plant licensed to operate in Vietnam came online in late April, another signal of the country’s increasing reliance on renewable energy. But analysts forecast that coal-fired power

The Department of Energy (DOE) in March 2018 released a 52-page report outlining its multi-year strategy to improve cybersecurity. In the report’s introduction, Assistant Secretary Bruce J. Walker noted that

Numerous articles have boldly declared Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) to be the first of many climate change-related bankruptcies to come. The authors wag their fingers in caution at corporations across

Geothermal energy has been around forever, used as a heating source across the world. Today it has surfaced as another renewable resource, with advancements in drilling technology bringing down costs and opening new areas to development. In conjunction with the feature article on geothermal in the May 2019 issue of POWER, we sought opinions from […]

Between 2005 and 2016, the global installed capacity of solar PV increased more than seven-fold, and the capacity of onshore wind increased nearly three-fold, and owing to plunging costs, variable renewable energy (VRE) capacity is set to expand dramatically, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). To accommodate soaring shares of VRE generation, innovations […]

Offshore moorings have a long tradition in the oil and gas industry. Even though most offshore mooring systems feature similar components, they differ a lot in design, depending on the bathymetries, the metocean data, and the design of the platform they support. But despite the wide range available in the market, the fast development of […]

The malicious threat landscape for industrial control systems (ICSs) is constantly evolving and getting more sophisticated, thereby raising the need to have visibility, implement protective controls, and perform continuous monitoring. As a result, it is important to take a look at the attack vectors of some malware/malicious events—such as Triton—that have occurred over the last […]

Utilities deploying precise timing in their networks have an additional choice in evaluating solutions based on whether or not the devices are IEEE certified for compliance to the appropriate IEEE 1588 Power Profile. To reach this point, years of effort from the IEEE, International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and […]

ThorConIsle is an offshore 500-MWe thorium molten salt reactor constructed inside a ship’s hull, ready to provide power from navigable waterways. The ThorCon “pot” operates at a pressure of 3 bar gauge

Power and energy construction projects are often complex and nearly always full of risks. On some jobs, miscalculating schedules and underestimating material expenses can result in hundreds of millions of

The power grid is a pretty complex system. Electricity is generally produced on an as-needed basis. Generators ramp up and down based on demand. However, energy storage systems are beginning to change how

Heat exchangers are vital equipment for power plant operation. Many different types of heat exchangers exist, but for applications that cannot afford cross contamination of shell-side and tube-side fluids

In preparation for a large-scale power sector shift toward decarbonization, several major power equipment manufacturers are developing gas turbines that can operate on a high-hydrogen-volume fuel. According to

A continuous emissions monitoring system (CEMS) is required in the U.S. under Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations to continuously collect, record, and report emissions data from industrial