The POWER Podcast
The POWER Podcast provides listeners with insight into the latest news and technology that is poised to affect the power industry. POWER’s Executive Editor Aaron Larson conducts interviews with leading industry experts and gets updates from insiders at power-related conferences and events held around the world.
Episodes
Former U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who is now a senior policy advisor for the law firm Van Ness Feldman and co-chair of the Natural Allies Leadership Council, is keen on natural gas and believes it is part of the solution to reaching both domestic and global climate goals.
“Natural gas in America is not the enemy,” Landrieu said as a guest on The POWER Podcast. “The majority of the emissions reductions of the United States in ...
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July 17, 2024 • 50 mins
In 2018, Cooperative Energy, a generation and transmission co-op headquartered in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, had an issue to deal with. Several years earlier, it had joined the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), giving the power provider access to a competitive market. However, Cooperative Energy’s R.D. Morrow Sr. Generating Station, a 400-MW two-unit coal-fired facility that had opened about 40 years earlier, was not ...
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Nuclear power has consistently provided about 19% to 20% of total annual U.S. electricity generation since 1990. It provides significant amounts of electricity in many other countries as well.
According to data from The World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR), a total of 414 reactors were operating in 32 countries, as of July 1, 2024. Preliminary data says China generated the second-most electricity from nuclear power in 2023...
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June 13, 2024 • 17 mins
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports SAIDI and SAIFI values in its Electric Power Annual report, which is regularly released in October each year. In the most recent report, the U.S. distribution system’s average SAIDI value including all events was 335.5 minutes per customer in 2022. If major event days were excluded, which is often a worthwhile exercise to get accurate long-term trends because hurricanes and s...
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June 6, 2024 • 25 mins
FBI Director Christopher Wray, while speaking at the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats in Nashville, Tennessee, in April, warned that U.S. critical infrastructure is a prime target of the Chinese government.
“The fact is, the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China’s] targeting of our critical infrastructure is both broad and unrelenting,” he said. Wray also noted that the immense size and expanding nature of the ...
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May 30, 2024 • 17 mins
The power industry has long been lamenting its aging workforce. While turnover has been happening for years, there remains a large percentage of power professionals on the verge of retirement.
Furthermore, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts faster than average job growth for engineering occupations. That means experienced workers with the skills needed by the power industry are in high demand and can be choosy when looki...
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May 20, 2024 • 47 mins
Wildfires have had a devastating impact on California and on the state’s largest utility company, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E).
Potential wildfire liabilities exceeding $30 billion led PG&E to file for bankruptcy in January 2019. The company emerged from bankruptcy on July 1, 2020, with a renewed focus on mitigating wildfires within its 70,000-square-mile service territory in northern and central California.
“A lot has changed,”...
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It’s no secret that the U.S. electric power system has undergone a remarkable transition that continues today. Coal-fired generation, which was the leading source of power generation during the 20th century, often providing more than half of the country’s electricity supply, fell to about 16.2% of the mix in 2023. Meanwhile, the U.S. solar market installed 32.4 GWdc of electricity-generation capacity last year, a 51% increase from ...
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It’s no secret that power grids around the world need to expand to accommodate more renewable energy and the so-called “electrification of everything.” The latter, of course, refers to the growing trend of using electricity to power various sectors and applications that have traditionally relied on fossil fuels, such as natural gas or petroleum-based products. The electrification of everything includes the push toward electric vehi...
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April 19, 2024 • 26 mins
There are several obstacles to overcome when building a clean-energy project, but perhaps the biggest is getting through the generator interconnection queue (GIQ). Every regional transmission organization (RTO) and independent system operator (ISO) in the U.S. has a significant backlog in its GIQ and processing interconnection requests can take years to complete. This has created a significant barrier to deploying renewable energy,...
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April 9, 2024 • 37 mins
Today, molten salt reactors (MSRs) are experiencing a resurgence of interest worldwide, with numerous companies and research institutions actively developing various designs. MSRs offer several potential advantages, including enhanced safety, reduced waste generation, and the ability to utilize thorium as a fuel source, as previously mentioned.
“There are several molten salt reactor companies that are in the process of cutting deal...
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March 13, 2024 • 21 mins
In mid-January, scientists who maintain the world’s temperature records announced that 2023 was the hottest year on record. NASA researchers say extreme weather across the planet, including heat extremes, wildfires, droughts, tropical cyclones, heavy precipitation, floods, high-tide flooding, and marine heat waves, will become more common and severe as the planet warms. That’s a big problem for power grids, because extreme weather ...
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March 7, 2024 • 27 mins
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) explains that community solar, also known as shared solar or solar gardens, is a distributed solar energy deployment model that allows customers to buy or lease part of a larger, off-site shared solar photovoltaic (PV) system. It says community solar arrangements allow customers to enjoy advantages of solar energy without having to install their own solar energy system.
The U.S. Depa...
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February 15, 2024 • 30 mins
If you have paid any attention to nuclear power plant construction projects over the years, you know that there is a long history of cost overruns and schedule delays on many of them. In fact, many nuclear power plants that were planned in the 1960s and 1970s were never completed, even after millions (or billions) of dollars were spent on development. As POWER previously reported, by 1983, several factors including project manageme...
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February 1, 2024 • 34 mins
It seems everywhere you go, both inside and outside of the power industry, people are talking about hydrogen. Last October, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced an investment of $7 billion to launch seven Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs (H2Hubs) across the nation and accelerate the commercial-scale deployment of “low-cost, clean hydrogen.” Hydrogen is undoubtedly a valuable energy product that can be produced with zero or nea...
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January 23, 2024 • 20 mins
Climate change has led many states and countries to set targets for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from power systems. Oregon, for example, has set targets for all power sold to retail customers in the state to have GHG emissions cut by 80% by 2030, 90% by 2035, and 100% by 2040.
It’s a challenging task, but Portland General Electric (PGE), a fully integrated energy company that generates, transmits, and distributes electr...
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December 28, 2023 • 18 mins
Boilers obviously play an important role in the power generation industry, providing the mechanism to convert heat produced by burning fuel into steam that can be used to drive a turbine to generate electricity. But many other industries also use boilers to produce steam for a variety of purposes.
Boilers are commonly used for space heating in industrial facilities, including in factories, warehouses, and office buildings, as well ...
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December 14, 2023 • 24 mins
According to a guidebook issued by Sandia National Laboratories, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) multi-mission laboratory, microgrids are defined as a group of interconnected loads and distributed energy resources (DERs) that act as a single controllable entity. A microgrid can operate in either grid-connected or island mode, which includes some entirely off-grid applications. A microgrid can span multiple properties, generating ...
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November 30, 2023 • 19 mins
Concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world. One of the key ingredients in concrete is Portland cement. The American Concrete Institute explains that Portland cement is a product obtained by pulverizing material consisting of hydraulic calcium silicates to which some calcium sulfate has usually been provided as an interground addition. When first made and used in the early 19th century in England, it was ter...
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November 21, 2023 • 29 mins
There is growing demand for cybersecurity professionals all around the world. According to the “2023 Official Cybersecurity Jobs Report,” sponsored by eSentire and released by Cybersecurity Ventures, there will be 3.5 million unfilled jobs in the cybersecurity industry through 2025. Furthermore, having these positions open can be costly. The researchers said damages resulting from cybercrime are expected to reach $10.5 trillion by ...
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