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The POWER Interview: Protection Testing Paradigm—How Utilities can Adapt to the Digital Era

February 6, 2022

The digital transformation in the power generation industry touches several areas, encompassing engineering, monitoring and control, asset performance, and operations optimization, among others. Power plant operators know the digital era has been a perfect fit for their industry, enabling digitization to reduce risk, save costs, optimize performance, and speed crisis response.

Doble Engineering is a company at the forefront of the digital age in power generation, enabling utilities and power plant operators to understand asset health through the group’s diagnostic test equipment, software, and services for the electric power industry.

Ed Khan, director of Protection Training at Doble Engineering, provided POWER with insight into the ways digitization has changed the power industry. Khan and Doble continue to research and develop ways digital-based applications can serve electricity producers moving forward, at a time of rapid change in the power sector, particularly when it comes to protecting assets and operations.

POWER: Which industry trends or changes should be most top of mind for power and utility companies today?…

Wheeler: Keeping U.S. Coal Sector Alive Will Benefit ‘International Environmental Protection’

June 29, 2019

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Coal power, which has seen a marked decline in the U.S., is necessary for reliability and energy affordability, and sustaining it could boost pollution technology exports and “improve lives while driving down emissions worldwide,” said Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler in a speech last week.

Wheeler made the remarks at a 90-minute event that the EPA held on June 19 to rationalize why the final Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule is a better option than the Obama administration’s landmark Clean Power Plan. The event, which was streamed live, also featured a long list of speakers from the coal industry and pro-coal states, with coal miners and other stakeholders in the audience.

Like the Clean Power Plan,the ACE rule will regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs), and it will be founded firmly on the agency’s 2009 Endangerment Finding. However, the ACE rule focuses on the nation’s 600 coal-fired units and gives states leeway on deciding how they will meet “emission guidelines” stipulated in the rule.…

Troubled FirstEnergy Companies Seek Bankruptcy Protection

April 3, 2018

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FirstEnergy Corp.’s competitive arm FirstEnergy Solutions (FES) and several key subsidiaries, including FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co. (FENOC), on March 31 sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. FirstEnergy said the move would facilitate an “orderly financial restructuring” and accelerate its strategy to become a fully regulated utility.

FES—the parent company of FE Aircraft Leasing Corp., FirstEnergy Generation, FirstEnergy Nuclear Generation—along with FirstEnergy Generation Mansfield Unit 1 Corp., Norton Energy Storage, and FENOC filed the voluntary petition seeking relief under Chapter 11 with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Ohio.

In aggregate, the companies have about $ 3.8 billion of funding indebtedness. FES, which sells power and related services to retail and wholesale customers in Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, in December 2017 reported total assets, liabilities, and capitalization of about $ 5.5 billion, but brought in revenues of about $ 3.1 billion.

FES holds about $ 1.5 billion of funded indebtedness, including a $ 700 million secured revolving credit facility; about $ 332 million of 6.05% of unsecured notes, which are due in 2021; about $ 363 million of 8.80% unsecured notes due in 2039; and a $ 150 million revolving credit note with Allegheny Energy Supply Co.,…