wind plants

A week before the Preakness and two weeks after the Kentucky Derby, it was an atomic horse race in Baltimore. Reactor vendors trotted out their technologies at the ELECTRIC POWER Conference & Exhibition in sessions that filled the nuclear track’s 96-seat room at the Baltimore Convention Center. The reactor makers were also soliciting help from the audience for offers of supply chain items (in short supply) and engineering talent (in even shorter supply). It was dealmaking time extraordinaire.

Big three in a race for market share

Preventing catastrophic failure is the No. 1 priority for power industry mechanical engineers and supervisors. Though a variety of factors can contribute to such failures and ensuing production downtime, engineers unanimously agree that corrosion is the single biggest contributor to these events. The Laramie River Station,located east of Wheatland, Wyoming,implements an aggressive facility maintenance schedule each year and now utilizes new coatings technologies to help protect new and existing assets from the devastating effects of corrosion. Laramie River Station is one of the largest consumer-operated, regional, joint power supply ventures in the U.S. and is owned by the Missouri Basin Power Project (MBPP).

Siemens Energy has delivered the first two of five massive coal gasifiers—each with a thermal capacity of 500 MW—to Shenua Ningxia Coal Industry Group Co.’s coal-topolypropylene plant (SNCG) in China. The gasifiers, which are 59 feet long with an inside diameter of about 10 feet, weigh 20 tons and are capable of gasifying up to 2,000 tons of coal daily. Gasification takes place in a cylindrical reaction chamber at temperatures above the coalash fusion temperature.

The idea of harnessing the vast power of Earth’s oceans has tantalized humans for more than a century. Today, the prospect of generating as much as 4,000 TW of clean energy from marine sources is fueling a resurgence of interest in a variety of technologies.

As wind power becomes more important to more utility resource portfolios, so does the availability of wind farms. Some utilities address the issue by specifying in their contracts with wind farms a target mechanical availability for the project, such as 98% for smaller wind turbines or 95% for the megawatt-size turbines.

This, along with annual generation guarantees, enables them to more effectively establish the reliability of wind power resources. The two guarantees work hand-in-glove, because it is conceivable that a wind farm could meet its annual guaranteed generation level with poorly performing wind turbines.

One of the obstacles preventing wind plants from becoming a first-rate electricity resource is the inability of wind farm owners and developers to accurately predict and guarantee wind energy delivery. Wind energy resource assessments typically use several years’ worth of wind data. These assessments typically develop estimates of long-term mean wind speeds based on on site anemometer data or on reference anemometer data from a nearby location.