Plant of the Year

Winning POWER’s highest honor, South Fork Wind—the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in U.S. federal waters—stands as a beacon for the power sector’s ambition to forge new industries in the

Previous winners 2024: Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4 Win POWER’s Plant of the Year Award 2023: Estrella del Mar III, a Visionary Floating Power Plant, Is POWER’s Plant of the Year 2022: Wudongde Project Takes Hydro to New Heights 2021: Technology Triumph: Track 4A Is POWER’s Plant of the Year 2020: T-Point 2 Is […]

For more than four decades, POWER magazine has honored the top performers in the electricity-generating industry with annual power plant awards. Award winners are selected by the editors of POWER based on nominations submitted by industry insiders, including suppliers, designers, constructors, and operators of power plants. Winning POWER’s Plant of the Year in 2023 is […]

Winning POWER’s highest honor is Estrella del Mar III, a first-of-its-kind floating combined cycle gas turbine power barge that fulfills a remarkable assortment of modern power system demands. Nearly fully

After years of upgrade and retrofit projects, and a keen focus on safety and continuous improvement, the Coal Users’ Group board of directors selected Platte River Power Authority’s Rawhide Unit 1 as the

It’s always difficult to select winners from the field of nominations submitted to POWER for its annual awards, and this year was no exception. The Wudongde Hydropower Station was the big winner, while

A multi-year, multibillion-dollar undertaking on China’s Jinsha River has achieved several “firsts” for the hydropower sector, earning POWER’s highest honor thanks to its development, design, and

Winning POWER’s highest honor is Track 4A, Southern Power Generation’s 1.4-GW natural gas–fired power plant in southern Malaysia that is equipped with the first commercial GE 9HA.02 gas turbines—one of

It may be unusual to recognize a demonstration facility with POWER’s Plant of the Year award, but T-Point 2 is a remarkable unit that is poised to change the way power plants operate. Besides validating new

Winning POWER’s highest honor is a set of three gas-fired power plants and related infrastructure—the Egypt Megaproject—which was the single biggest order ever in Siemens’ long history. Completed in a

The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant Unit 2 was the first new nuclear unit added to the U.S. fleet in more than 20 years. There were challenges along the way, but the colossal effort

I’ve developed something of a love/hate relationship with awards. Initially, it’s exciting to spot outstanding or unusual projects for our POWER awards, but over time, any number of things can happen to those plants, making them appear less than stellar. Sometimes it’s changing policy or market conditions that make a record-setting plant completely uneconomic (see […]

Düsseldorf’s new “Block Fortuna” at the Lausward Power Plant, owned by municipal utility Stadtwerke Düsseldorf, is setting records and giving Germany’s coal-fired power plants some much-needed competition for backing up the nation’s large percentage of variable renewable power. Germany’s Energiewende (literally, “energy turn”) functions as something of a living laboratory, where innovation equals survival, because […]

  What motivates you? Is it mostly the paycheck you earn from your work in the power industry? Friendships with your coworkers? How about winning awards? I’m very proud of our small but savvy and productive editorial staff, which includes two associate editors (Sonal Patel and Tom Overton) who, over the past two years, have […]

The 2014 POWER Plant of the Year makes history, both as a project and as our cover story. The Plant of the Year award goes to the most interesting, usually new, plant in the previous year. Sometimes it’s a

The era of Big Solar has arrived, and at the moment there are none bigger than Ivanpah. For overcoming numerous obstacles to build the world’s largest solar thermal plant, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is awarded POWER’s 2014 Plant of the Year Award. When the 392-MW Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in Nipton, Calif., […]