On Friday, June 26th, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act. Viewed by some as the most important environmental and energy legislation in our nation's history, it is clearly the most significant since the Clean Air Act of 1970.

The bill’s four major elements include:
• A clean energy requirement, designed both to set new standards for current types of power generation and to accelerate development and deployment of clean energy technologies such as renewables, energy efficiency and carbon capture and storage.
• An efficiency requirement that provides funding for energy efficiency programs, and the setting of stronger building codes and product efficiency standards.
• A...
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Among the many reflections I’ve had in the wake of our most recent Users Summit are: 1) that NeuCo is incredibly fortunate to have longstanding and loyal CombustionOpt customers that recognized our broader technology vision and are now reaping the benefits; 2) that objectives, priorities and challenges shift over time; and 3) in virtually all cases, substantial additional benefits are obtained beyond those used to justify the initial optimization investment, some which can be monetized, others which are more difficult to quantify but valuable nonetheless.

The multiplicity of benefits – expected and unexpected – brings up one of my pet peeves: the overly simplistic but commonly-held view that combustion optimization equates to NOx minimization. While it is true...
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We decided to hold our Users Summit amidst what we and others coined the Perfect Storm for the power industry. In addition to the multitude of environmental, regulatory and workforce pressures, generators are facing lower energy demand, budget cuts, travel moratoriums, layoffs and much more. We knew attendance would be down. We knew some customers feared that to travel anywhere, no matter what the rationale, would reflect negatively on them. And some were told “don’t even ask.”

Despite that, customers encouraged us to hold the event. Some took vacation time to attend, or paid for their own airfare. Others drove more than 800 miles, or flew halfway around the globe. Understand that we’re not talking about a Pink Floyd reunion concert or a tropical cruise...
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Time has given us some perspective – and compelling data – about integrating combustion optimization software with boiler optimization spectroscopy sensors. So I wanted to close our blog series on the CombustionOpt and Zolo integration project with some thoughts on what we’ve learned, where the system is at now, and what Deely’s vision is for this technology going forward.

Lessons learned and bumps in the road
With any new technology there’s a learning curve, and this project was no exception. We overcame several obstacles to get to the point we’re at now.

Shortly after the Zolo system was installed and energized, we had a rash of unexplained window failures (windows in front of the lasers). After investigating,...
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I have never seen such far-reaching legislation with so many nuances and so many major implications for stakeholders advance so quickly within the U.S. Congress. The reason is simple: enforcement of the 2008 Supreme Court ruling that CO2 is criteria pollutant and should be regulated by the EPA would threaten the viability of coal-fired power, our economy, and our society as we know it.
 
The legislative alternative around which consensus is rapidly emerging entails 65 percent allocation and 35 percent auction. The auctioned portion will cost a lot but allows coal-fired generation and life as we know it to continue. All stakeholders would rather deal with the costs as opposed to shuttering existing...
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