coal industry

Opponents of massive new energy taxes and regulations breathed a small sigh of relief in June when the Lieberman- Warner climate-tax bill went down in flames on the Senate floor. Even 10 Democrats broke with the party and voted against it, writing that they would have opposed the bill on final passage. Unfortunately, power-mad bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) remain undaunted.

Worse than Lieberman-Warner
The EPA released in mid-July a document that blueprints a dizzying array of greenhouse-gas regulatory programs under dozens of different provisions of the 1970 Clean Air Act.The document,

Lamar Light and Power is a municipal utility that has been generating the southeastern Colorado city’s electricity since 1920. Rising natural gas and oil costs pushed LL&P to retire its steam plant five years ago and begin hunting for more economic power sources. The answer: repower the existing plant with a state-of-the-art coal-fired circulating fluidized-bed combustor and cross-connect old and new steam turbines. The $120 million project will stabilize the region’s electricity rates for many years to come and is the winner of POWER’s 2008 Marmaduke Award for excellence in O&M—named for Marmaduke Surfaceblow, the fictional marine engineer/plant troubleshooter par excellence.

A sonic horn (also called an acoustic horn or acoustic cleaner) produces and amplifies low-frequency sound vibrations at high intensity to fluidize and remove material buildup. Because the sonic horn doesn’t apply mechanical vibration, it doesn’t compact material or segregate it by particle size and is less likely to cause vessel failure than a continuously operating mechanical vibrator.A sonic horn is also used to start bulk

Modern ocean power systems look to convert the mechanical energy of waves or tidal movement to electrical energy. But that’s not all the sea has to offer. It may also be possible to capture and convert the enormous quantities of heat produced by magma escaping through seafloor vents—an undersea version of geothermal energy.

Once it’s enacted, the impact of climate change legislation on the electric power industry will be ten times bigger than that of the Clean Air Act,” said Dan Adamson, an attorney with the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine and chair of the opening session at the 2nd Annual Carbon Constraint Conference (Figure). His was just one of many interesting predictions made during the lively presentations and discussions at the event, which is now colocated with the ELECTRIC OWER Conference & Exhibition. This two-day conference focused on the impact of carbon constraint laws and technical solutions for the power generation industry.

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.

On a larger scale, the North American coalfired generating industry has been scrambling for economically viable ways to retrofit existing infrastructure with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) solutions.Power producer TransAlta Corp. Recently announced it will partner with technology developer Alstom on a project to develop an extensive CCS facility in Alberta, Canada.