POWER Magazine

U.S. grid planners are preparing for annual electricity demand growth of about 0.9% to 1.6% through 2050, with data centers emerging as a major driver, and EPRI—the Electric Power Research Institute—suggesting they could account for as much as 17% of U.S. electricity demand by 2030.

POWER’s 2026 Reinvention Award goes to Dominion Energy South Carolina’s Parr Station, where new dual-fuel turbines replace decades-old peaking units and extend a century-long pattern of reinvention at one of the utility’s oldest generating sites. For more than a century, the Parr site along South Carolina’s Broad River has done whatever the grid needed it to do next. It began as a run-of-river hydro plant powering Columbia’s electric streetcars.

Restoring customer supply is not the same event as restoring a process plant. Sarnia’s 2003 outages show why power-system resilience has to be carried through safe shutdown, utilities, environmental controls, and staged restart. The Grid Event Was Only the First Failure State That timeline is useful for grid history. It is not enough for industrial resilience.

Central Hudson Gas & Electric, located in Poughkeepsie, New York, and serving the suburbs of metropolitan New York City north to the Capital District at Albany, commemorated more than a century of service in New York state during 2025. The company, which has about 315,000 electricity customers, and 90,00 natural gas customers, provided a program focused on performing 125 acts of service and pledging up to $1 million to local organizations that uplift and support Hudson Valley residents.

The integration of intermittent renewable energy to power grids worldwide has meant there’s a need for technologies designed to support grid stability. Siemens Energy, working with Electricity Supply Board (ESB), Ireland’s leading energy company, developed a stabilizing system using a synchronous condenser at the former coal-fired Moneypoint power station in southwest Ireland near Kilrush, County Clare.

A high-voltage insulator can look unchanged for years while its operating environment steadily alters the conditions on its surface. Salt carried inland from a coast, industrial residue, road dust, moisture, ultraviolet radiation, and repeated weather cycles create an exposure history that can influence electrical performance and maintenance demands long before an asset reaches a predetermined retirement age.

Just hours before his flight back to work on Aug. 24, 2026, seafarer John Cris Tropicales watched his younger brother graduate with a bachelor’s degree in criminology, reported Ulysses “Chuckie” Rivera, community relations manager for Quezon Power (Philippines) Ltd. Co. (QPL) and San Buenaventura Power Ltd. Co. (SBPL). It was a milestone that the Tropicales family’s circumstances once made unlikely.

At the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, hosted by Sen. Dave McCormick at Carnegie Mellon University on July 15, 2025, Westinghouse Electric Co. put a live proof of concept on display: an artificial intelligence (AI) system aimed at reducing the cost and schedule risk of building new AP1000 reactors. According to Westinghouse, the demonstration pulls in thousands of construction data points so constructors can adjust project schedules in real time.

ArcLight Capital Partners, an investor in power and energy infrastructure, said its fund has completed the acquisition of a 50% stake in IATP, a large-scale, 5.4-GW power portfolio comprising 11 power infrastructure assets located across North America. Invenergy will retain its existing 50% ownership interest and operational role in IATP.

Small modular reactors (SMRs) borrow steam turbine engineering from both coal-fired and nuclear plants, but the resulting “wet steam” problem, with exhaust moisture topping 15%, demands a fresh set of design countermeasures to keep blades from cracking. With impressive breakthrough innovations in small modular reactor (SMR) technology, the quiet yet significant evolution of SMR steam turbines has been largely happening outside the limelight.