Power Systems

What, if anything, distinguishes the three major presidential candidates on energy and environmental policy? Not much, based on papers posted on their web sites, public comments, and interviews reported on in the nation’s newspapers. Let’s split some hairs on the candidates’ energy and climate change policy positions.

Here’s a political quiz. Match the quotation with the candidate (answers are at the end of this article):
1. “I think nuclear power has to be part of our energy solution.”
2. “I don’t think we can take nuclear power off the table.”
3. “I believe we have to go back to nuclear power.”
a. John McCain
b. Hillary Clinton
c. Barack Obama

Last month, in Part I of this article, we detailed and quantified the impacts of postcombustion CO2 capture on a coal plant’s net output and efficiency. This month we do the same for four other CO2 reduction techniques: oxyfuel combustion, using higher-temperature and higher-pressure boilers, cofiring biomass, and replacing some coal-fired capacity with renewable
capacity.

In our April 2008 issue, the article “The aging workforce: Panic is not a strategy” focused on how to reconfigure human resource practices in order to find enough well-trained new personnel to replace the large number of baby boomers who will be retiring in the next few years.This month we profile several utilities that are using innovative approaches to recruit younger technical staff and skilled craft labor to fill positions being vacated in growing numbers by retiring employees.

The risks of corrosion causing catastrophic events at power plants were discussed in “The case for cathodic protection” in POWER, February 2008. Though the oil and gas industries arestrictly regulated and must provide protection for all pipelines, that protection stops at the gates to a power plant. Some plant managers don’t realize they have no on-site protection; others may have corrosion protection systems but don’t know how they operate—or if they are even functional. Cathodic protection is the proven way to stop corrosion and prevent further oxidation on storage tanks and pipelines within a plant. So, educating yourself about the basics of cathodic protection (CP) is a vital responsibility of power plant staff.

A new solar energy system invented by IBM researchers could render concentrator photo voltaic (CPV) technology cost effective and more efficient. The computer technology company has combined innovations from its R&D in cooling computer chips with a large magnifying glass and a tiny solar cell—and it has so far generated power of a density five times that of CPV cells used in typical solar farms. The scientists used a large magnifying glass to concentrate about 200 sun systems onto a 0.4-square-inch solar cell into 2,300 sun systems (“one sun” is a measurement equal to the solar power incident at noon on a clear summer day).

sent to NRC Thirty years after the U.S. government began assessing if a remote ridge in the Mojave Desert 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nev., was suitable for the nation’s first permanent deep geologic nuclear waste repository, the Department of Energy (DOE) has formally filed an application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a license to proceed with construction. The 17-volume, 8,600-page application that the NRC received by truck on June 3 details the DOE’s plan to safely isolate spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in tunnels deep underground at Yucca Mountain.

In mid-2006, a Google search of the term “Smart Grid” generated around 2,000 responses.The same search this past month yielded more than 500,000 hits from a wide variety of sources.The explosiveness of the concept is especially interesting because there is no universal agreement on what constitutes a smart grid—much less agreement on what value a smart grid will provide to the industry and its customers. The challenges we face in defining and constructing a smart grid are deciding if we are designing a comprehensive smart grid and determining what about our design makes it smart.

Modern predictive maintenance systems can monitor the health of most plant equipment. By sorting through the wealth of information those systems deliver, operators can discern important trends, including the early signs of a system or component failure.

The ability to detect contaminated feedwater or steam before it can corrode the internals of a turbine or HRSG and cause a forced outage is worth millions. One knock against cation conductivity monitoring—still the most common technique for the early detection of contamination—is the difficulty of interpreting conductivity readings when the plant’s makeup contains significant levels of organics or CO2. Here are the pros and cons of cation conductivity monitoriting and some alternative monitoring methods.

A new study concludes that within a decade, growing water demand in the West and reduced runoff due to drought may deplete waters feeding the 2,080-MW Hoover Dam, a facility that generates power for more than a million people in Arizona, Nevada, and Southern California (Figure-1).

Drought and increased demand could be threatening Hoover Dam’s ability to produce hydro power. Source: