Energy Update
(Wed, 02 May 2018) Growth in Canadian crude oil production has outpaced expansions in pipeline takeaway capacity and, along with past pipeline outages, has driven Canadian crude oil prices lower and increased Canadian crude oil exports by rail to the United States. However, the outlook for increased volumes of Canadian crude oil shipped by rail to the United States is highly uncertain despite significant U.S. demand for Canadian crude oil, specifically on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Last year nearly 44,000 wind turbine technicians around the world completed or refreshed their standardized basic safety and technical training and early indications suggest at least 20 percent more will do so in 2018. Why does this matter? Put simply, we need standardization.
Utilities know their larger corporate customers want clean energy to fulfill their sustainability goals and help their bottom line. Rather than contracting directly with developers, many corporations are finding a new way forward through so-called “Green Tariffs” designed by the utilities themselves.
Non-destructive testing is a broad category of inspection methods that technicians use to highlight cracks, corrosion, and irregularities that are too small to see with the naked eye but nonetheless can compromise the integrity of gears, bearings, blades, and other structural pieces that make up wind turbines.
Distribution grid operators are concerned that high penetration of connected distributed energy resources (DERs) could lead to grid instability and create outages at end-user sites, such as commercial buildings or industrial plants. “Today, we don’t fully understand grid behavior under varying DER conditions, and are not sure how to address this properly,” said Fred Oshiro, Engineer from Maui Electric in Hawaii, during a DistrbuTECH panel discussion in January 2018.
The global wind turbine fleet, which, according to data from the Global Wind Energy Council, currently stands at about 341,000, faces an important reality as the years go by – many of its units are getting old.
While it is still early days for steel in the water, the U.S. offshore wind industry is ripe with activity. As of April 2018, there were 30 active offshore wind sites in the U.S. with three very close to beginning construction.
Royal Dutch Shell and its joint venture partner China National Offshore Oil (CNOOC) have started production at the second ethylene cracker at their $4.1bn Nanhai petrochemicals complex in China.
SABIC and ExxonMobil have created a new joint venture (JV) to advance their Gulf Coast Growth Ventures project, a 1.8 million tonne ethane steam cracker plant in Texas.
The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy has unveiled a program that will provide up to $23 million for the research and evaluation of next-generation wave, tidal and current system technology.
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