Karadeniz Energy Group has awarded a contract to Alstom to supply power transformers for the 486MW Karadeniz Powership Osman Khan (KPS12) power plant in Turkey.

Under the terms of the contract, Alstom will manage the design, engineering, production, supply, testing and commissioning of the 200MVA power transformers.

The transformers will be produced at Alstom Grid’s manufacturing site in Gebze, Turkey. The company is expected to deliver the transformers by early 2016.

Alstom Grid Power Transformers commercial director Tunc Tezel said: “Alstom is very pleased to work with Karpowership, the world leader in floating power plants, on this powership concept.

“This contract reflects the quality and the high-performance of Alstom’s transformers, as well as its technical expertise in this field.

“The ability to help countries meet short-term energy demand quickly and in a cost-efficient manner is an important step to providing more people access to sustainable and reliable electricity.”

Floating power plants or powerships are barge or ships mounted, converted from bulk carriers, heavy-lift vessels and they supply electricity to the countries falling under the purview of agreements signed under the Power of Friendship project.

Powerships are capable of connecting to the electricity grid immediately upon berthing, solving short-term energy problems.

According to Alstom, Karadeniz Powership Osman Khan is the world’s largest floating power plant.

Karadeniz aims to increase the installed power, from 1,500MW with nine energy ships, to more than 5,000MW by the end of 2017.

20 Mar 2014

CLP has agreed to pay HK$12 billion to increase its ownership of Castle Peak power station from 40 percent to 70 percent, giving the power company control of the facility.

It will buy the 30 percent stake from existing shareholder Exxon Mobil which will also sell its remaining 30 percent stake to China Southern Power Grid.

CLP has also agreed to buy the remaining 51 percent stake in Hong Kong Pumped Storage Development from Exxon Mobil for HK$2 billion, making the unit a wholly-owned subsidiary.

CLP said the transactions will help the company better manage the co-ordination of its Hong Kong generation business with its transmission and distribution operations.

The transactions are scheduled to be completed in the middle of next year.

19 Nov 2013

by Cheung Chi-fai, SCMP:

Chief of largest power firm says consumers will be told implications of each mix of sources

Hong Kong’s energy future will rely on an “open and transparent” public consultation that will tell people the implications of their choices in favouring a particular energy mix, says the chief of the city’s largest power firm.

Richard Lancaster, chief executive officer of CLP Holdings, said all relevant information, from energy security and environmental performance to costs, would be made available.

“All implications should be made as open and transparent as possible so that the community has all the information needed to make a judgment,” he said at the World Energy Congress in Daegu, South Korea, last week.

Environment Secretary Wong Kam-sing, also speaking last week, said the consultation aimed to find out the most acceptable energy mix in terms of the proportion of coal, gas, renewable and nuclear in electricity generation by the power firms.

Any decision on the future mix will have significant bearing not just on cost, but also the environment and reliability.

While the mix was a matter for policymakers, Lancaster said it should be “flexible” enough to meet challenges, including the volatility of international fuel prices. “It is important we don’t lose our flexibility and close all options,” he said.

In 2010, the Environment Bureau consulted on a climate-change strategy that proposed a plan for half of electricity demand to be met by nuclear fuel, 40 per cent by gas and 10 per cent by coal by 2020. But it decided to reconsider it last year after the 2011Fukushima nuclear disaster. The mix is now 54 per cent coal, 23 per cent from nuclear and 23 per cent from natural gas.

Lancaster said to ensure supply diversity, he opposed closing all coal-fired plants. “Coal is something we can reduce. But to go to the extreme of closing down coal-fired plants, it would be a bad thing for us,” he said.

Lancaster also wanted to diversify local gas supply by building a liquefied natural gas terminal in eastern Shenzhen which could bring in cheaper gas from around the world when international prices dropped.

On nuclear energy imports, Lancaster acknowledged there were “genuine concerns” that needed to be addressed. But he said one way of tackling these concerns was to have a Hong Kong firm involved in developing mainland nuclear stations.

“We have higher transparency, modern Hong Kong management style, Hong Kong standards of governance to apply for nuclear power stations,” he said.

Christine Loh Kung-wai, the environment undersecretary who also attended the congress, said that while “some people” in society hated nuclear, she had heard of no one who wanted to completely drop imports from the Daya Bay nuclear station.

“Instead of just telling us nuclear should not be allowed, there needs to be an objective discussion on how we look at coal and gas,” she said.

Loh, however, said it would be difficult for the government to tell the public exactly what future prices would be for different fuel mixes as even the most authoritative agency in the United Nations could only provide a loose range of prices.

21 Oct 2013

By Ralph Nader, Reader Supported News

It has been over two years since the earthquake and tsunami that brought about the nuclear reactor crisis in Fukushima — the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. The situation at the six plants is still grim. Four of the reactors are damaged. Hundreds of tons of contaminated groundwater are reportedly seeping into the ocean every day. Nearly 83,000 people were displaced from their homes in the approximately 310 square mile exclusion zones. On Wednesday October 9, an accident resulted in six workers being doused in radioactive water. Accidents and mishaps at the Fukushima site are regular occurrences. Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has now asked the world community for help in containing the ongoing Fukushima disaster, as it continues to spiral out of control.

Earlier this week, I participated in a panel discussion in New York City called “The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident: Ongoing Lessons.” The event featured notable long-time experts on nuclear technology discussing the crisis in Fukushima and the current state of the heavily subsidized nuclear industry in the United States. The panel participants were former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Commissioner and later Chairman Peter Bradford, former NRC Chairman Dr. Gregory Jaczko, former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, and nuclear engineer, Arnie Gundersen.

Mr. Bradford presented a detailed power point that showed how competing forms of energy already are leading to the decline of the nuclear industry.

The panel discussed safety concerns regarding the Indian Point nuclear power plant located about 30 miles from New York City. Indian Point has long been rife with safety problems and its location near an earthquake fault is a source of great concern for many New York residents. You can view Tuesday’s event, in its entirety, here.

The Indian Point nuclear power plant is currently operating without a license after its previous license expired on 28 Sep 2013 (The Examiner News)

In the 1960s, The Atomic Energy Commission determined that a class-nine nuclear power plant accident could contaminate an area the size of Pennsylvania and render much of it uninhabitable. A nuclear disaster at Indian Point would threaten the entire population of New York City and its outlying metropolitan area. The continued existence and operation of Indian Point is like playing a game of Russian Roulette with the lives and homes of the nearly 20 million people who live within a 50 mile radius of the plant. Consider the difficulty New Yorkers have simply commuting to and from their workplaces during rush hour and imagine the horror of a mandatory evacuation due to a nuclear emergency at Indian Point. The NRDC estimates that a serious accident could, in addition to massive casualties, “cost ten to 100 times more than Fukushima’s disaster” which would be in the trillions of dollars.

Indian Point, located dangerously close to New York City itself. (Z Magazine)

If Indian Point were closed today, there is enough surplus energy capacity to last the state until 2020 as alternative energy sources are developed and deployed. Governor Andrew Cuomo has called for the shutdown of Indian Point, as did Hillary Clinton during her time in the Senate. A main reason is that an emergency evacuation of the population up to 50 miles around these two nukes is impossible.

So what’s the delay? Mainly resistance from the nuclear industry and a compliant regulatory agency. The NRC has faltered in its watchdog role by acting to protect and even bolster the dangerous, expensive and unnecessary nuclear industry. The industry’s last claim is that it avoids greenhouse gases. But as physicist Amory Lovins says, if the investment in nuclear plants was shifted to renewables and energy conservation, it will produce less demand and more environmentally benign BTUs by far, and with more jobs.

Anti-nuclear advocates have warned against potential dangers such as earthquakes for decades. Although a new nuclear power plant has not been ordered and built in the United States since 1974, there are currently 65 nuclear plants operating 100 reactors in the United States — many of them aging, many of them near earthquake faults, many of them still not in compliance with NRC fire prevention regulations, all of them significant national security risks. Under President Obama, the first two nuclear reactors since 1978, were authorized to be built at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia. (Panel participant Dr. Gregory Jaczko was the lone dissenter in the 4-1 NRC approval vote.)

To truly understand the cost of nuclear energy, one must consider the absurdity of the nuclear fuel cycle itself. It begins with uranium mines and their deadly tailings, then the fabrication and refinement of the fuel rods, the risky transport of these rods to the multi-shielded dome-like plant where they are installed, and then firing up the plant so it goes critical with a huge amount of radioactivity. Dealing with volatile nuclear reactions requires flawless operation. And then there is the storage and guarding of hot radioactive wastes and contaminated materials that persist for 250,000 years. No permanent site has been located and licensed for that lengthy containment.

What is the end purpose of this complex and expensive chain of events? Simply to boil water — to generate steam to turn turbines to produce electricity.

With all the technological advancements in energy efficiency, solar, wind and other renewable energy sources, surely there are better and more efficient ways to meet our electricity needs without burdening future generations with deadly waste products and risking the radioactive contamination of entire regions should anything go wrong.

It is telling that Wall Street, which rarely considers the consequences of gambling on a risk, will not finance the construction of a nuclear plant without a full loan guarantee from the U.S. government. Nuclear power is also uninsurable in the private insurance market. The Price-Anderson Act of 1957 requires taxpayers to cover almost all the cost if a meltdown should occur.

No other industry that produces electricity poses such a great national security risk should sabotage or malfunction occur. No other means of generating power can produce such long-lasting catastrophic damage and mayhem from one unpredictable accident. No other form of energy is so loaded with the silent violence of radioactivity.

Nuclear energy is unnecessary, uninsurable, uneconomic, unevacuable and most importantly, unsafe. The fact that it continues to exist at all is a result of a ferocious lobby, enlisting the autocratic power of government, that will not admit that its product is unfit for use in the modern world. Let us not allow the lessons of Fukushima to be ignored.

12 Oct 2013

China will replace four coal-burning heating plants in the capital Beijing with natural gas fired ones by the end of next year as it steps up efforts to clean up pollution, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday.

The report, citing the city’s Municipal Commission of Development and Reform, said the four plants and some 40 other related projects would cost around 48 billion yuan (HK$60.1 billion) and cut sulphur dioxide emissions by 10,000 tonnes. It did not detail the related projects.

The plan is the latest step by authorities to deal with a persistent smog crisis in China’s big cities that is fuelling public anger. The capital has been shrouded in thick hazardous smog for several days during the ongoing seven-day national holiday.

China has been under pressure to tackle air pollution to douse potential unrest as an increasingly affluent urban populace turns against a growth-at-all-costs economic model that has besmirched much of China’s air, water and soil.

Last month the government announced plans to slash coal consumption and close polluting mills, factories and smelters, though experts said implementing the targets would be a major challenge.

The new plants will replace four coal-fired ones that provide heating for homes in the city’s central urban area as well as generating electricity, Xinhua said.

The four burned 9.2 million tonnes of coal in 2012, or 40 percent of the 23 million tonnes the city consumed in the year, it added.

5 Oct 2013

The project was initially met with objections, since natural gas would be much more expensive to source in coal-rich China. The city is expecting huge financial losses if heat and electricity generated from natural gas plants are charged at current rates. But with pictures of smog-filled Beijing splashing international front pages, as well as increasing unrest over pollution in general, it seems that high-ranking government officials stepped in to ensure the project will go through as proposed. (A more in-depth story on this is available on chinadialogue.net)

A coal-fired power plant in Zhejiang, China. Switching to natural gas may be a luxury only Beijing can afford. (China Guodian Corporation)

No mention is made, though, of other sources of pollution, such as vehicle emissions. Once a city of bicycles, Beijing is now home to more than 5.2million motor vehicles and a road network endemic with chronic jams, making a major contribution to the city’s air pollutants. More work would be needed if the city is serious about improving its air quality.

UK Officials and representatives of the energy sector tour the newly operational plasma waste-to-energy plant on Teesside, Middlesbrough (Ian McIntyre/GazetteLive)

Clear The Air has prepared a collection of articles updating on the plasma progress in the past year, on plants setting up in India, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.

One of the effects of Typhoon Usagi, which received little attention, was its impact on the Honghaiwan wind farm in Shanwei, eastern Guangdong, about 130 kilometres northeast of Hong Kong. The onshore wind farm comprises 25 imported Vestas V47 600KW turbines. The website Windpower Intelligence reports that eight of the turbines were blown down by the typhoon, while the blades of another eight turbines were blown off, and the blades of the remaining turbines are being examined to see if they can operate normally.

Typhoon Usagi's damage to turbines in Shanwei's wind farm (CCTV, SCMP)

CCTV2 reported that 70 per cent of the wind farm had been knocked out. Windpower Intelligence reports that one of the managers says the typhoon has led to 100 million yuan in losses for the wind farm. This is the second time the wind farm has suffered typhoon damage. The farm was hit in 2003 with damage to 13 out of 25 turbines, causing losses of 10 million yuan.

The recent damage may have caused some unease within the government and possibly within Hongkong Electric and CLP, the two companies planning wind farms in Hong Kong waters. CLP, Hong Kong’s largest power company, plans to build what will be one of the biggest offshore wind farms in the world off Sai Kung – generating 200 megawatts a year – at a cost of almost HK$7 billion. Hongkong Electric is to build a HK$3 billion wind farm between Lamma Island and Cheung Chau that would generate 100MW of power – enough for 50,000 households.

Since Shanwei is fairly close to Hong Kong, it is frequently used as a reference for winds in Hong Kong. “This is another indication of how ill-advised these Hong Kong wind projects are,” Ng Young, the chairman of Hong Kong’s Association for Geoconservation, told Lai See.

The companies are still involved in testing work, and construction has yet to begin. At best the two wind farms might produce about 1.5 per cent of Hong Kong’s total electricity production, and reduce its output of carbon dioxide by about 2 per cent. This miniscule contribution comes at a cost of HK$10 billion. Regardless of how useless these wind farms are, the government can point to them as its contribution to reducing Hong Kong’s carbon footprint and take its place in the world’s effort to limit the production of carbon dioxide, and thereby global warming, or so they would have us believe. As for the power companies, the farms are a wonderful opportunity for them to increase their net assets at a time when returns from the scheme of control, which governs them, have been reduced from 13.5 per cent to 15 per cent under the previous scheme, which ended in 2009, to 9.99 per cent under the current scheme. But they will get 11 per cent on their wind farm assets since they are a form of renewable energy. Meanwhile, the public picks up the bill in the form of higher electricity prices. Higher fuel costs are inevitable, but better to spend this on efficient clean energy like gas.

Ng says the wind farms are unsightly and kill birds, and are an unreliable source of energy. He makes the point that the Shanwei wind farm operates at an average of 17 per cent to 18 per cent efficiency: “The government is silly to support this project – building this white elephant just for the sake of appearing to do something green, when in fact it is damaging the environment, and costing the community a lot of money in terms of higher fuel bills and higher costs to business. The only beneficiaries are the power companies.”

Source URL (retrieved on Aug 28th 2013, 5:40am): http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1299985/new-coal-fired-power-stations-guangdong-will-kill-thousands