HR Milner Offline; New UBC Biomass

HR Milner went offline at 12:25 yesterday…The University of British Columbia will soon be home to the first installation of a new biomass combined heat and power system developed by Nexterra Systems Corp. and GE’s Jenbacher gas engine division. The city of Vancouver and local companies will supply tree trimmings and other urban wood waste diverted from the city landfill as fuel for the plant. The 2MW system will require about 12,500 bone-dry tons of wood waste…BC Hydro awarded a contract to Voith Hydro in Montreal for the complete overhaul of five Francis turbine units for Gordon M. Shrum hydro power plant, located near Hudson’s Hope, British Columbia. Voith Hydro’s scope of supply includes five new 310 megawatt turbines, site construction, installation, and start-up. The first unit is scheduled for commissioning in 2012. Each year, one unit will be replaced until all five units are in service in early 2017…Solar and wind power are booming in California, but there are times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. So California utilities are looking to smooth out those bumps by doing something rarely done on the grid today: storing electricity. The California Independent System Operator is the traffic cop of the state’s electrical grid. Its job is to forecast how much electricity the state needs — every four seconds — and to make sure it’s supplied. Inside an unmarked building outside of Sacramento, dozens of people are glued to computer screens, and on one wall, there’s a display plotting a big red line showing how much electricity California is using right now, in real time. Just outside of Los Angeles in Huntington Beach, Praveen Kathpal of AES Energy Storage shows off one of the biggest batteries in the state. From the outside, it looks like a simple shipping container-it’s a 2-megawatt energy storage unit. Inside the container is packed with 83,000 small lithium-ion battery cells..