POWER August 2014 - 6

SPEAKING OF POWER
And the Winner Is . . .
T
he 2014 POWER Plant of the Year
makes history, both as a project and
as our cover story.
The Plant of the Year award goes to the
most interesting, usually new, plant in
the previous year. Sometimes it's a " first, "
like last year's first U.S. ultrasupercritical
(USC) coal plant. This year it's the world's
largest solar thermal plant: Ivanpah Solar
Electric Generating System.
Awards provide snapshots of what's
happening in an industry at a given time.
By their nature, they are retrospective,
especially for long-lead-time utility-scale
generation. Though the John W. Turk, Jr.
plant was last year's Plant of the Year, it
may well be the last USC plant built in the
U.S. The same may be true for Ivanpah
and concentrating solar power (CSP) towers.
For a number of reasons, including
the decreasing cost of distributed photovoltaic
generation vis á vis utility-scale
CSP, Ivanpah may go down in the record
books as an extra-large pilot project.
Nevertheless, it is a noteworthy facility
for all sorts of reasons, as you'll see in
our cover story.
For nine out of the past 11 years, the
Plant of the Year has been some sort of
coal plant. This year, for the first time, it's
a renewable plant. That only seems fitting,
especially as the importance of renewable
generation increases globally.
A Shifting Balance of Power
According to the U.S. Energy Information
Administration, for 2013, the main sources
of U.S. generation were: coal, 39%; natural
gas, 27%; nuclear, 19%; hydropower,
7%; and other renewables (biomass, geothermal,
solar, and wind), 6%. Just over
50% of all new U.S. capacity in 2013 came
from natural gas (no surprise), while solar
accounted for 22%, coal added 11%, and
wind accounted for 8%; other renewables
made up the balance.
Globally, a report by the U.S. National
Renewable Energy Laboratory found that
renewables accounted for 23% of generation
by 2012; the EIA estimates global
renewables generation for 2011 was 21%
and projects it will reach 25% by 2040.
6
Of course, we've all seen the balance
of power sources shift in response to
everything from politics to markets to
natural disasters, which is why POWER
award winners aren't chosen simply
based on what technology is in ascendency.
We're also looking for innovation,
best practices, and projects that
help advance the sector in some way.
In several ways-including technology
improvements, financing, and ownership
profile-Ivanpah moves the needle.
Innovation and Risk
Innovation almost always entails risk, and
the utility industry is notoriously riskaverse.
When significant technology advances
are attempted, cost and schedule
overruns almost always enter the picture.
Award-Worthy Projects
It could be argued that every power plant,
new or improved, is a winner because it
supplies much-needed electricity. However,
to be an award winner, a project needs
to do something distinctive-be the first,
biggest, or most efficient; have overcome
daunting obstacles; or have developed
an ideal solution to a particular problem.
This year's slate of POWER award winners,
covered in our August through December
issues, has an even more interesting mix
of projects than in years past. It's almost
as if economic and environmental constraints
are making developers and owners
think outside the familiar boxes.
For example, combined heat and power
is becoming a more important component
in more places. And this year we are giving
This year, for the first time, it's a renewable
plant.
In the U.S., cost and schedule overruns
for nuclear plants are legendary. More
recently, new-technology coal plants are
seeing the same sorts of escalations. For
example, the cost of Southern Company's
Kemper County integrated gasification
combined cycle plant (designed to capture
65% of carbon dioxide emissions) has
risen from roughly $2 billion in 2006 to
well over $5 billion as of mid-2014. Anticipated
plant startup has been delayed
by a year and is now expected in the first
half of 2015.
Developing Ivanpah wasn't fast or
cheap, either, for an even broader set of
reasons than those affecting advanced
coal plant development. Finding a balance
between potentially increased customer
costs and more efficient and cleaner generating
technologies is never easy; however,
if utilities, equipment manufacturers,
and investors never made that effort, we'd
still be reading by smokey kerosene lamps
and heating our homes with particulatespewing
carbon sources (as is still the
case in some parts of the world).
www.powermag.com
the Marmaduke Award to a combined cycle
plant that was disassembled and moved to
a completely new location to provide both
power and thermal energy.
And our first Water Award goes to a plant
that was committed to finding a unique solution
to flue gas desulfurization wastewater
treatment that values both environmental
protection and economic rationality.
In our awards coverage in the months
ahead you'll read about very large plants and
very small ones, because there are critical
roles for both scales. It's also clear from the
nominations received that Asia is actively
building considerable new capacity. It's not
only large nations like China and India that
are developing large-scale infrastructure, but
also smaller nations like South Korea building
many right-sized plants in record time to
meet growing demand.
To all of you who work every day to
make your company worthy of notice in
one of our award-winning projects, congratuations-and
keep up the good work!
-Gail Reitenbach, PhD, Editor
(@GailReit, @POWERmagazine).
POWER | August 2014
http://www.powermag.com
POWER August 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of POWER August 2014
