electric power

The climate change debate has been dramatized in movies, on Hollywood’s red carpets, and in documentaries featuring melting ice caps. The collective effect is extraordinary,and positive. America now stands ready to address one of its toughest challenges since the industrial revolution—decarbonizing our energy supply and economy. Now the hard work begins. I strongly support federal legislation to create a mandatory and declining national cap on carbon dioxie (CO2) and other greenhouse gases, with a target to reduce these emissions by 60% to 80% by 2050. I also applaud Sens.

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

Documenting changes to the distributed control system and other digital plant applications should be considered a critical element of managing risk—and of safe, efficient daily operations and maintenance. Coming up with a practical configuration management approach, though, isn’t easy.

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.

To stay within shrinking federal and state carbon emission allowances, companies in the U.S. and around the world are scrambling to take up innovative solutions and clean up or cut down carbon dioxide emissions.Amid ongoing gasification tests and carbon sequestration experiments, Massachusetts- based GreenFuel Technologies Corp. has been quietly conducting studies with several companies at their coal-fired plants to develop high-yield algae farm technologies.Its mission: to profitably recycle industrial carbon dioxide and produce feed, food, and fuel ingredients.

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.

Siemens to build combined-cycle plant in Portugal. Siemens Energy
is to build two turnkey combined-cycle units for ElecGas S.A. at Central Termoeléctrica do Pego in Abrantes, northeast of Lisbon. ElecGas S.A. is a joint venture of the independent power generation company International Power plc and the Spanish utility Endesa S.A. Following the units’ start-up, tentatively set for 2011, Siemens will also assume responsibility for maintenance of the power train for a period of 25 years. The order, including the long-term service agreement, is valued at about $947million.

Since Asia’s largest utility, Tokyo Electric Power Co.(TEPCO), shut down its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant(Figure-1) following a major earthquake last July,Japan’s nuclear-generated output has plummeted—and will stay low.

Reuters reported that TEPCO’s nuclear output was 79.2% lower this February than last year,and the Hokuriku Electric Power Co. announced recently that it expects to keep its sole nuclear plant closed for the business year ending in March 2008.So to meet swelling demand, the country that once derived 30% of its power needs from nuclear generation has offset that decline with fossil-fueled generation.Japan’s 10 main utilities have generated record-high amounts of electricity for seven months straight compared with last year.