Power Plant Load Determination

Carbon Capture Hopes Dim as AEP Says It Got Burned at Coal Plant

On a brittle, blustery afternoon on the outskirts of New Haven, West Virginia , the faint odor of ammonia isn’t the only sour note in the air. New Haven, an Ohio River coal mining town of 1,550, is home to American Electric Power Co. Inc.’s 1,300-megawatt Mountaineer Plant. The plant has a 1,103-foot-tall chimney and burns 12,000 tons of coal a day to generate electricity for AEP’s 11-state grid, which supplies power to 5.3 million customers.

In the process, it annually belches out 8.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Abutting the plant is an ambitious $100 million experiment: a seven-story, steel-and- fiberglass rectangle, corralled by dull metal catwalks and rattled by motors and pumps. The apparatus traps a portion of the plant’s carbon-dioxide-rich exhaust using an ammonia-based catalyst. (Hence the acrid smell.) The reclaimed CO2 is pumped 8,000 feet underground, where, in theory, it will remain harmlessly out of the atmosphere. The goal of the experiment is to prove that carbon capture and storage technology, or CCS, works, and in so doing, provide one possible solution to global warming, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its July 25 issue.

This year catastrophic storms, drought, and relentless heat have underscored how welcome such a solution would be. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration , 2011 continues the trend of rising temperatures that has seen nearly every year of the 2000s hotter, on average, than the 1990s, and the 1990s hotter than the ’80s.

Coal generates 40 percent of the world’s electricity -- a number that could grow to 60 percent by 2030, according to a 2009 report by the Coal Industry Advisory Board of the International Energy Agency . (Developing countries are expected to account for 97 percent of that growth because they have almost no alternatives.)

Coal is also “the world’s most CO2-intensive fossil fuel,” accounting for more than 40 percent of all energy-related CO2 emissions, the report says. CCS, say climate scientists, has emerged as the lead technology in the race to reduce global greenhouse gases 50 percent by 2050. And when the New Haven project -- hitching one of America’s largest power companies to the U.S. Energy Department’s carbon capture bandwagon -- was launched in 2009, there was a sense of determination and common cause. “It’s time to advance this technology for commercial use,” declared AEP Chief Executive Officer Michael G. Morris. The company planned to replace its pilot with a larger $668 million CCS facility, which would bury more than 1 million metric tons of CO2 a year, splitting construction costs evenly with the Energy Department. Environmentalists heralded the project.

Blog @ MoreWhat.com » Japan Marks 66th Anniversary of Hiroshima ...

Pick it up from ‘Japan surrenedered six days later.’ During WWII Boeing and other US aircraft companies filled the skies with American planes. Isoroku Yamamoto was credited for stating ‘we have awakened a sleeping giant’ after the attack on Pearl Harbor. These days Boeing is under attack by the Obama administration for trying to create jobs in South Carolina. Big Labor and Obama only want jobs that favor their chosen workers. Funny how things change.

Tom Brokaw and the phrase ‘the greatest generation’ describes America at its best. Patriotism, traditional American values, hard work, determination and sacrifice are the attributes of 20th century America during WWII as the US and allies defeated Nazi Germany and the Axis powers including Japan.

So this week marks the first time ‘ratings crowd’ downgrades America’s creditworthiness. It has been said our credit rating is now equivalent to America in 1917. While word has it Germany is ready to risk carring the load for debt in the EU, America’s credit rating has been downgraded and Japan marks the 66th anniversay of the bombing that ended WWII by declaring their intention to move away from nuclear power. All the while Iran is still being allowed to pursue nuclear weapons. Funny how things change.

It’s time for change in America. The changes are already underway. US leadership dominated by liberal Democrats and liberal establishment Republicans is under siege. The 2010 midterms ushered in a new era marked by the Tea Party and more conservatives being elected to Congress. Mirrored by similar events in the several states the liberal agenda is slowing going the way of other socialist and Marxist regimes in world history. The Berlin Wall fell two decades ago. Many other symbols and threats to liberty will be defeated in the coming days and years.

The latest fiasco in Washington, D.C. over big government is just the beginning of what started late last year. The American dream will survive as the liberal agenda has, as Yamamoto once said, awakened the sleeping giant as conservative principles are being supported by ordinary Americans to take back our country and return to the wisdom of our nation’s founding.

God bless America.

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Power plants and power systems control 2006, a proceedings volume from the IFAC Symposium on Power Plants and Power Systems Control, Kananaskis, Canada, 2006