Often Overlooked Cost of Power Generation

We came across this article concerning the poor conditions surrounding power generation in Africa. Entire families are perishing from the noxious fumes of power generators throughout the developing areas of Africa. In Lagos, Nigeria, the phenomenon is especially terrible.

Observers said that there are thousands of people dying from similar ailments days or months after they had inhaled the poisonous fumes without detecting them especially from industrial generators. With these and many cases of poisonous fumes from generators decimating especially the country's productive population, many residential quarters, especially in Lagos metropolis now live in fear. If the trend is not checked, death tolls could rise to an unimaginable proportion.

Large manufacturers leak toxins and pollutants into the environment, and the effect is multiplied by the pollution let loose by power generation that's needed to fuel them. This predicament is made even more dire given the fact that Nigeria is undergoing an energy crisis. With an aging infrastructure, pollution increases and inefficiency abounds. But without outside capital investment, there is little hope for the power generation situation to improve.

Laramie River Station Rewind Video

Check out this video about the Laramie River Station, which sports a new power generation turbine. There's some good information about industrial generator rewind, which the turbines featured can undergo to improve the longevity of the power generation plant.

The blades are manufactured in England, the rotor is forged in Poland, and the fixed blades and fit-up assembly is done in Mexico. Each upgrade costs about $8 million. Once all three units have a new turbine, LRS will put out an extra 36 megawatts. Another project during this plant outage is the generator rewind. All these bars, or windings, are sawed off and pulled out. Maintenance planner and scheduler Myron Mattern says these are basically copper pipes, made to allow water through for cooling. Once all the windings are out, the generator is cleaned down to the bare steel. Then, two rows of new windings are fitted in -- 84 bars in all. Hence, a rewind. [...]

The reason this rewind had to be done was because General Electric found that this model of generator was having water leakage problems. Mattern says fixing this problem now is cheaper in the long run.

Power Generation Seeing Frenzied Growth in China

We've written about how alternate energy's growth has been waxing and waning in China. Well, there's a recent story from BusinessWeek about China's economy, which has been growing (perhaps too) quickly, lately. This growth includes gains made in the power generation industry, which has seen its fastest rise in over five years. The only downside to all this growth is the threat of an economic bubble (which can see an ensuing burst), and inflation.

In related news, China's largest wind power producer, China Longyuan Power Group Corp., raised more than $2 billion in its initial public offering, yesterday. Wind power production companies have more than tripled in Hong Kong trading this year, and China expects more than twenty percent of its electrical power to be generated from wind by 2020.