KCP&L wins POWER magazine’s 2011 Plant of the Year Award: Kansas City Power & Light (KCP&L) wins this year’s top award from POWER magazine for Iatan 2, located 30 miles northwest of Kansas City.The approximately $2.4 billion project, which was part of a Comprehensive Energy Plan (CEP), met its goals in large part because of a collaborative planning process and the use of innovative contracting and project controls. The result is not only affordable baseload power but also reduced overall fleet emissions.
The Iatan 2 project received kudos all along the way. For establishing the CEP planning process, The Edison Electric Institute awarded KCP&L its 2007 Edison Award. Environmentalists have also praised the project. When the Sierra Club and Concerned Citizens of Platte County intervened in the Prevention of Significant Deterioration permit process, the end result was a Collaboration Agreement, whose provisions included CO2 emissions offsets, additional wind supply, and more. The Sierra Club described the result of the negotiation “a groundbreaking agreement that can serve as a model for environmental groups and utilities working together.”
For these achievements, as well as more technical ones involving innovative solutions to plant systems design challenges, Iatan 2 has been awarded POWER’s Plant of the Year Award.
For more details about the project, see “KCP&L’s Iatan 2 Earns POWER’s Highest Honor” in the August issue of POWER (www.powermag.com).
By repurposing an old combustion turbine for use as a synchronous condenser to provide local reactive power, CFE—the federal agency responsible for generating, transmitting, and delivering electricity—significantly reduced local power supply limitations.
Though it wasn’t simple to add a new clutch to a 40-year-old plant, clever engineering, patience, and coordination among all the parties involved resulted in a model retrofit. In fact, CFE is seriously considering similar upgrades to other aging gas turbine generators throughout Mexico. CFE believes that older gas turbine generators that have been well maintained and that are located in, or can be relocated to, reactive power–deficient regions might well prove invaluable long past their usual retirement dates.
For its savvy plant repurposing, CFE’s CTG Universidad Unit 2 is the winner of POWER’s 2011 Marmaduke Award for excellence in power plant problem-solving. The award is named for Marmaduke Surfaceblow, the fictional marine engineer and plant troubleshooter par excellence.
For more details about the project, see “CFE Extends CTG Universidad Unit 2’s Life with Conversion to Synchronous Condenser” in the August issue of POWER (www.powermag.com).
VEC is a member-owned, not-for-profit cooperative founded in 1938 and Vermont’s third-largest electric distribution utility. VEC began putting its grid modernization plan together in 2001—well before what would come to be known as smart grid projects were on the radar of even large utilities.
Unlike some other deployments of smart meters, VEC’s primary rationale for the bidirectional meters was to improve service, rather than change end user behavior right away. Combined with a new GPS-enabled outage management system, substation upgrades, online access to electricity usage information, and other initiatives, VEC’s smart grid efforts have enabled it to cut outages in half, reduce outage time, and improve customers’ understanding of their monthly bills.
For more details about the project, see “Vermont Electric Cooperative Takes Wise Approach to Smart Grid Projects” in the August issue of POWER (www.powermag.com).
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