Combustion scientist Herman Snyder, who relocated from Wisconsin, had worked at a Caterpillar subsidiary designing gas turbine engines.
"A gas turbine eats up its insides after five or six years, " Immelt explains.
Then Siemens opened a gas turbine factory in Charlotte, and formed a partnership with Central Piedmont Community College.
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It's also where you'll find an intriguing startup, Innodyn, that is attempting to shrink the size of gas turbine engines.
West paints other trains, including the Steam, Gas turbine, Electric, as well as first through sixth Generation Diesel Electric Locomotives.
MIT, is trying to design a miniature gas turbine for the purpose.
Combustion scientist Herman Snyder, who relocated from Wisconsin, had worked at a Caterpillar (nyse: CAT - news - people ) subsidiary designing gas turbine engines.
Note that microturbines offer the highest electrical efficiency, up to about 5 MW, which is the size of the first traditional gas turbine offered in a recuperated model.
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With a gas turbine for a second stage, one is now operating at a 56% electrical efficiency and at natural gas pipeline stepdown substations, they operate at 60% efficiency.
While the ESMAP paper cited above suggests annual cost declines of 7% for gas turbine technologies, case studies from industry suggest a rate of cost decline at least double the ESMAP figure.
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These could be among the first full-scale power plants in the nation to turn powdered coal into a synthetic natural gas that is burned in a gas turbine whose exhaust gas powers a steam turbine.
With many markets, such as aerospace, industrial gas turbine and commercial building remaining soft, and the residential construction market being hampered by severe winter weather, Alcoa says that it will strengthen its performance by developing innovative products that add value for its customers.
The UBS report explains that while nuclear energy has suffered a powerful blow, and it is not clear when and how it will get back on its feet, GE will benefit, despite having built the generators, as its strong gas turbine business, along with its smaller renewable portfolio, will step in to cover the output gap generated from a diminishing inventory of nuclear power plants.
They'd lived through more than one "revolutionary" power train--Wankel engines, gas-turbine engines, batteries.
It has its eye on a joint project to design a gas-turbine modular helium reactor with the United States, Japan and France.
Thanks to a 30% federal tax credit, that works out as much the same as a combined-cycle gas-turbine plant but without the noise and fumes.
Most of the extra supply comes from inefficient gas-turbine generators.
Meanwhile Rolls-Royce has sought to insulate itself from the quirks of procurement by applying its design to other industries: 80% of the gas-turbine technology used in its best-selling jet engines is the same for the energy and marine sectors.
The difference between turbocharging and supercharging is simple: a turbocharger boosts engine air pressure by using exhaust gas to power a turbine that pushes more air into the combustion chamber.
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It is the thermal energy of the gas, after all, that the turbine converts into electricity, so the colder the gas, the lower the yield.
The 600-megawatt Indiana plant will convert coal into turbine-ready gas while stripping out pollutants nitrogen and sulfur.
Consider that for every BTU of coal or natural gas burned in a combustion turbine only 35 percent of that is converted into useful power.
This gas is used to drive the turbine just as steam would be.
Combined-cycle gas turbines, which use hot exhaust gases from one turbine to generate steam to turn a second one, can transform 6, 800 Btu of gas into a kilowatt-hour of electricity, enough to light one lightbulb for ten hours.
That puts the gas under sufficient pressure to spin a turbine and thus generate electricity.
At a high temperature and pressure, gasification converts coal, or other carbon fuels, into synthesis gas that is either burned in a turbine to produce electricity, as in Summit's case, or turned into other products, like diesel oil, fertilizer and pipeline-quality natural gas.
Too hot, as it turns out: The gas stream has to be chilled to 1, 100 degrees Fahrenheit before hitting the turbine blades.
Simple math shows that a marginal gas or oil well has a power density at least 22 times that of a wind turbine while a nuclear power plant has a power density that is more than 8 times that of a solar photovoltaic facility.
Thanks to dramatic advances in wind-turbine technology, the costs of setting up and operating wind generators now approach those of gas turbines, even without subsidies.
The Hywind, a 2.3 megawatt (MW) wind turbine built by Siemens, combines technologies from both the wind farming industry and the oil and gas sectors, and will be tested off the coast of Norway for two years.
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