POWER

In his climate change speech earlier this summer, President Obama announced a major policy shift: The U.S. government will end financing for virtually all new coal power plants oversees. In the wake of that

Mexico Creates Council to Meet Clean Energy Target. The Mexican Energy Secretariat on July 5 announced creation of the Renewable Energy Council , a body designed to spearhead eight initiatives outlined in a

In March 2013, and for the first time in the 35-year history of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA), the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) initiated an enforcement action in

Owner/operator: AES Jordan PSC AES Corp.’s $300 million, 370-MW gas-fired Amman East Power Plant entered commercial service in 2008 and was the first independent power plant in Jordan. The Jordanian

Owner/operator: OMV Petrom S.A. Romania began the process of restructuring its vertically integrated, state-owned electricity industry to meet European Union (EU) directives several years before it joined the

Owner/operator: Florida Power & Light No one can accuse Florida Power & Light (FPL) of having anything against natural gas. The biggest consumer of gas in a state with the second-biggest appetite for

Once flush with cheap electricity, the Republic of South Africa has recently been beset by power shortages and reliability challenges as a result of decades of underinvestment in its electrical infrastructure

Owners: Chugach Electric Association Inc. and Anchorage Municipal Light & PowerOperator: Chugach Electric Association Inc. Alaska’s vast land mass broken up by mountainous regions and glacier fields does

Cybersecurity awareness and best practices are increasingly central to the power generation, transmission, and distribution industry. Industrial cybersecurity concerns, recently heightened by awareness of how

Perhaps because the public has been more obsessed in recent years by cybersecurity breaches involving everything from social media accounts to classified military secrets, the amount of attention given to the

On Sept. 25, 2012, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a construction and operating license (COL) to General Electric-Hitachi Global Laser Enrichment LLC (GLE) for its uranium enrichment plant

Even if you missed Bob Peltier’s retirement signoff in last month’s column, you will have noticed that something has changed. POWER has a new editor at the top of the masthead (its 10th in 131 years

When Gary Leonard, General Electric’s global technology director for aero-thermal and mechanical systems technologies, spoke with POWER Contributing Editor Mark Axford at this year’s Gulf Coast Power

Aging human machine interface (HMI) hardware will eventually become a burden on plant operation. Obsolete HMIs can cause problems with connectivity, historical data loss, and hardware failure. As the hardware

P at Wood III —former head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Texas Public Utility Commission, and current consultant and non-executive chairman of Dynegy—addressed a packed house at the

South Korea, the world’s fourth-largest producer of nuclear power, in June warned of “unprecedented” power shortages this summer after it shut down two reactors due to faulty safety equipment and delayed the start of operations of another last month.

In Japan, where all but two of 50 reactors remain shuttered for safety checks following the 2011 Fukushima catastrophe, at least four major utilities were gearing up to apply for safety screening of 12 reactors across six plants.

A proposal to build a $45.8 billion fixed barrage across the Severn estuary, between Brean in England and Lavernock Point in Wales, suffered another blow in June as an influential UK parliamentary committee deemed a high-profile privately financed proposal unsatisfactory for environmental and economic reasons.

A technology developed by the University of Delaware (UD) and NRG Energy that provides a two-way interface between electric vehicles and the power grid earlier this year became an official paid resource on PJM Interconnection’s regional grid (Figure 4). One of the first of its kind, the project proves the so-called “vehicle-to-grid” (V2G) concept can sell electricity from electric vehicles.

An updated estimate of technically recoverable global shale gas resources by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) puts them at 7,299 trillion cubic feet (tcf)—10% higher than estimated in 2011.

UN Report on Global Renewable Energy Investment. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) released its report Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2013 on June 11, finding that renewable energy investment at the global level was $244 billion in 2012. However, global investments in renewable energy fell 12% compared to 2011 due to dramatically lower […]

A municipal utility in the South may not be where you’d expect to find an exemplary smart grid implementation, but that’s just fine with EPB Chattanooga. Its leaders are raking in the kudos—including POWER’s 2013 Smart Grid Award—and their community is attracting new businesses in response to a fiber-optic-based system that has helped raise the profile of their city and bolster the sustainability of their utility.

Repowering two units at the J.T. Dudley, Sr. Generation Complex added 180 MW of high-efficiency capacity to South Mississippi Electric’s portfolio. Now the cooperative can self-produce more than 50% of its electricity needs.

Steve Elonka began chronicling the exploits of Marmaduke Surfaceblow—a six-foot-four marine engineer with a steel brush mustache and a foghorn voice—in POWER in 1948, when Marmy raised the wooden mast of the SS Asia Sun with the help of two cobras and a case of Sandpaper Gin. Marmy’s simple solutions to seemingly intractable plant problems remain timeless. This Classic Marmaduke story, published more than 50 years ago, reminds us that even the most modern steam plant is only as good as its operators.

Although nearly all energy experts agree that demand for electric energy in Texas will outstrip supply in the coming years, developers of new power generation facilities are facing significant headwinds. The cause of the problems is a unique mix of circumstances.

President Obama’s recent comments on climate change and the need for additional federal regulation of greenhouse gases carelessly handled the science he quotes.

In order to burn abundant supplies of coal globally while minimizing carbon dioxide emissions, cheaper methods of capturing, using, and storing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants are needed. A new federal agency is on the leading edge of identifying and supporting promising technologies.

Meaningful, yet often hidden thermal performance losses occur in feedwater heaters.

Gravity Power LLC—a startup based in Santa Barbara, California—has developed a low-cost, quick-start, and fast dynamic response energy storage technology that competes with classical pumped storage hydro and gas turbines for peaking and intermediate duty power generation. The system is simple, yet its potential is profound.