Second in the
green nation
Oregan utility PGE has raced to second spot (of 500) in US DoE’s national ranking of ‘green pricing’ programmes in terms of total sales of renewables energy, and third in terms of renewables customers registered. PGE puts its success down to choosing Green Mountain Energy Company as the supplier and marketer of two of their three renewable options. GMEC is the USA’s largest and fastest growing retail provider of cleaner energy.
Chicken run
Banham Poultry has won approval to build a £10 million 5.5MWe power plant to dispose of dried poultry by-products. The plant will use pyrolysis and gasification, heating dried poultry by-products in an oxygen-free environment to release a combustible gas.
The power plant will be located at Bunn’s Bank in Norfolk, UK, and will handle 1200 t/week of material. Planning consent from Norfolk County Council is under application.
Five bids in for utilities
Five companies have submitted bids for the 67% stake in Bulgaria’s power utilities that has been on offer. The Bulgarian Privatisation Agency has announced that Italy’s Enel, Germany’s E.On, the Czech CEZ, Greece’s PPC and Austria’s EVN have submitted bids for seven electricity distribution companies, which have been grouped into three equity pools. All companies have submitted bids for one or more of the three equity pools, but under the rules can only acquire one.
wave energy grant from Carbon trust
The UK Carbon Trust has made a £160 000 grant to Offshore Wave Energy Ltd (OWEL) towards a two-year development programme of a wave energy converter, named “Grampus”. The development programme will include the tank testing of an 18 m long model in a range of scaled ocean waves. It will also include mathematical modelling of the internal hydrodynamics and aerodynamics. To date, the completed feasibility study, which included tank testing at Southampton Institute, has suggested that the OWEL system could efficiently harness wave energy to compress air to drive a turbine.
New CEO for ABB
The Board of Directors of ABB has announced that Fred Kindle has been appointed as the group’s new chief executive. Kindle, currently CEO of Sulzer, will join ABB in September 2004, and assume the roles of president and CEO in January 2005. The current CEO, Jürgen Dormann, will revert to the single role of chairman of ABB Ltd.
FuelCell contract finalise D
FuelCell Energy and Caterpillar have finalised a contract with the City of Westerville, USA, to supply a 250 kW direct fuel cell power plant to supply power at a substation site in Ohio. The unit will be one of the USA’s earliest advanced utility-scale fuel cell power plants designed to feed power into a local distribution system. FuelCell Energy will manufacture the power plant, which is scheduled for installation later in 2004.
CNCGC to get $2.65
billion loan
The China National Coal Group Corporation (CNCGC) will receive loans totalling $2.65 billion from the State Development Bank (SDB)to meet its financial demands in the next four years. SDB will actively support CNCGC in its bid to build a large coal production base and become an international power giant by providing stable long-term capital support and financial services to CNCGC’s major projects and technical renovation. CNCGC has total assets of $4.4 billion, with a coal production capacity of 49 million tons and an installed generating capacity of 624MWe.
B & V chairman Roschmann retires
Dr Dieter Roschmann, for eight years the chairman of B & V Industrietechnik, retired on February 29 after presiding over one of the most successful periods in the company’s history. His successor is to be Dr Herbert Aly of Concord Power.
Southeast Power to buy 25% stake
Southeast Power of China will pay $66.5 million for a 25% stake in the new Zheneng Lanxi power plant. The power plant is planned to have four 600 MWe coal-fired units that are due to start operation in 2007.
