In case you are wondering about that power plant on the homepage...
It’s the Grays Ferry cogeneration facility, located on the Schuylkill River near downtown Philadelphia. I had a picture of it as a backdrop on my previous website, from a photo taken by one of my former students, Deepta Sateesh. You might remember Deepta from an earlier posting – she’s Academic Dean at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology in Bangalore – and a very talented photographer as well!
I’ve posted about the Grays Ferry facility on numerous occasions:
In September 2018, my ‘New Look’ posting noted that:
…I worked on [the facility] for more than eight years in the 1990s, obtaining three major air quality permits (allowing construction of the fifth generation of power generating equipment). Its efficient natural-gas-fired combustion turbine system utilizes selective catalytic reduction (SCR) to minimize NOx emissions, and is sufficiently clean that its 172 MW of power generation can be located immediately near the central part of the city (a key factor for such a district heating system).
In April 2010, a posting entitled ‘My Dad’ described the passing of my father, and noted that:
After graduating from Drexel U. in the early 1950s, he started out as an electrical engineer at the Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO), working at the Schuylkill Station (the photo is from a company newsletter at that time) — and he was quite pleased when I too worked at that site in the 1990s, helping to bring the fifth generation of combustion technology with the Grays Ferry Cogeneration project…
And in October 2018, in ‘Nanjing’s Stone City,’ I described how I used the Grays Ferry plant in conjunction with China’s great historical novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms:
…in [classroom] presentations I’ve portrayed the electric utility as the powerful Wei Kingdom; the steam host as the opportunistic Wu Kingdom; and the small, embattled project developer as the Shu Kingdom. This allows me to cast myself as Zhuge Liang (Kongming), the brilliant sage advising the Shu leader, trying to unite the Three Kingdoms (and capture the air pollution permit!). Zhuge Liang is revered within China – and my students usually find this highly amusing… and cannot believe that any foreigner would be so presumptuous!
In 1999, Grays Ferry was honored as Power magazine’s “Plant of the Year”; and in 2001, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy gave it an Energy Star CHP (Combined Heat and Power) Award. In 2007, the facility was purchased by Veolia, the French water/waste/energy firm – and a 2012 “Green Steam” upgrade expanded the regional natural gas pipeline and installed two new high-efficiency, rapid-response boilers at the station.