POWER

Quick, the grid is down—what do you do? If your procedures are like most, you rely on a combination of static restoration plans, emergency management system protocols, and operator experience and intuition. But today’s grid is increasingly complex and is subject to new vulnerabilities. Physical security is a critical concern, especially in the wake of […]

Finland Rejects Permit Extension for Olkiluoto Reactor. Finland’s government on Sept. 25 rejected an application from utility Teollisuuden Voima Oyj (TVO) to extend a permit for its proposed Olkiluoto 4 reactor for five years. TVO requested the extension in light of delays from its Olkiluoto 3 EPR project, which is being built by an AREVA-Siemens […]

India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) in September issued a proposal to vastly increase the county’s reliance on solar photovoltaic (PV) generation, taking installed capacity from its current 2.6 GW to more than 20 GW over the next five years. Following on the nation’s ambitious-but-troubled ultra-mega coal plant build-out—only one has come online, […]

After building three 1,000-MW dual-fuel simple cycle plants, each with eight combustion turbines, Mass Global Holding Ltd. recently repowered the Erbil Gas Power Station, located in Iraqi Kurdistan, using vertical heat recovery steam generators, adding 500 MW of capacity to the local grid.   Iraqi Kurdistan, located in the northeast corner of Iraq, is nation […]

Just as POWER predicted in its May issue (see “The Year Energy Storage Hit Its Stride”), energy storage is starting to gain traction, not only in the U.S., but around the globe. Europe’s largest commercial battery power plant was connected to the German grid in mid-September. With a power rating of 5 MW and an […]

Improving efficiency at existing coal-fired power plants anywhere in the world is a path of no regret: A more efficient power plant uses less coal, has lower emissions, and experiences lower variable costs. Great River Energy’s Coal Creek Station has demonstrated that by recycling low-grade waste heat with DryFining, it can reduce emissions, including CO2, […]

The first full-scale commercial post-combustion carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project at an operating coal-fired power plant is now online in Estevan, Saskatchewan, roughly 10 miles north of the U.S. border. The heart of the C$1.4 billion project at Boundary Dam Power Station is the rebuilt 110-MW Unit 3, originally commissioned in 1970. The project, […]

With rapidly growing electricity demand from North Dakota’s booming shale oil industry, Basin Electric Power Cooperative needed flexible peaking generation in a hurry. Two stations equipped with LM6000 turbines and clutches are providing both peaking and reactive power. U.S. electricity production has been flat for the past decade, hovering between 3.9 billion MWh and 4.1 […]

Vietnam won’t begin work on its first of eight planned nuclear power plants until at least 2020 or 2022 to ensure safety, the country’s Trade Ministry announced in September. Russia’s state-owned nuclear company Rosatom was expected to begin construction of the first two-reactor plant in the south-central province of Ninh Thuan at the end of […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s recent “waste confidence” ruling, which declares storage of spent fuel at reactor sites safe indefinitely, could fundamentally undercut the decades-long U.S. policy of seeking an off-site, permanent burial site for high-level nuclear waste. A five-decades-old goal of the U.S. nuclear power industry, its regulators, and the Department of Energy (DOE)—permanent, off-site […]

Before the polar vortex earlier this year, several severe cold weather events had presented comparable power generation operational challenges. POWER ranks those events here in terms of loss of generation capacity. Common themes observed in both severe and lesser cold weather incidents involve constraints on natural gas fuel supplies to generating plants, and generating unit […]

The U.S. power sector has seen a number of developments on the regulatory front in recent months. Here’s where major federal rules stand today. (For a more dynamic and graphic version of this article, see http://powermag.com/long-form-stories/bw-power/ .) GHG Rules New Power Plants. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in September 2013 revised a 2012 proposal to […]

Can hydropower get some love? Even fans of renewable energy can be forgiven for having forgotten about a resource that—up to now—has produced more electricity than wind, solar, biomass, and all other

A recent encounter with a newspaper from 1901 got me thinking about the price of electricity over time and how it compares with price changes for other goods and services. Price Changes Over a Century The

Gazprom on Sept. 1 made the first weld of a 4,000-km natural gas pipeline that will run from gas production centers in Russia’s Yakutia and Irkutsk gas production fields to Russia’s Far Eastern regions

Unbundled Renewable Energy Credits and the Benefits of Standardization Unbundled renewable energy credits and certificates (RECs) separate the renewable, or green, component of energy from the actual

A 7,100-MW±600-kV high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) line that runs 2,375 kilometers (km) from new hydropower plants on the Madeira River in the Amazon Basin to major load centers in southeastern Brazil

Kelly Speakes-Backman Every day there is increasing evidence that we need to accelerate our nation’s transition to a cleaner energy infrastructure. The American Climate Prospectus released by the Risky

Resource-rich Poland’s push to prioritize coal as its main energy source and to cultivate a nuclear power program to boost energy security at the expense of climate objectives has provoked its portrayal

Eskom, South Africa’s largest utility, was established in 1923 as the Electricity Supply Commission and was converted into a public company, wholly owned by the government, in July 2002. Eskom produces about

Arizona-based solar photovoltaic (PV) system provider First Solar in August said it had achieved a cadmium-telluride (CdTe) PV research cell conversion efficiency of 21%—a world record. The thin-film PV

Bad weather, unforeseen setbacks, and even natural disasters are far from unheard of during power plant construction. But there may be no plant that experienced the sort of construction hardships that Tokyo

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) in August revealed that it had developed a 2-MW 16-cylinder high-speed gas engine that potentially offers a power generation efficiency (lower heating value) of more than

In the October 2013 issue of POWER, Tata Power’s 4-GW Mundra ultra-mega power plant was recognized with a Top Plant award in the coal category. This year POWER recognizes another behemoth in the region—and

Although industrial lubricants typically account for only 1% of plant operational costs (Figure 1), the lack of proper lubrication products, techniques, or applications can have a much more severe effect on

This is a tough time to be running a business as power-intensive as aluminum smelting in India. The economic boom that has lifted many of the nation’s 1.2 billion citizens out of persistent poverty has

Germany’s energy transition— Energiewende —has made a lot of headlines. Whether you agree with the country’s energy policy or not, there is no denying that it has spurred the growth of renewables. Even

Cold temperatures are nothing new, but extreme winter weather has been in the headlines more and more in recent years. Many of us had never heard the term “polar vortex” before last winter, but earlier

A sustained Arctic blast composed of freezing rain, record snowfalls, and high winds hit 22 states, from Mexico to New England in early February 2011. The extreme weather severely affected the power generation

During the Jan. 3–12, 2014, polar vortex that brought record-setting cold temperatures and severe winter weather to much of the U.S., nuclear plants not only survived, but thrived. According to the Nuclear