CONFERENCE

Climate change and the need to find cleaner, carbon-free sources of energy are driving many generating decisions. The new administration has made it clear that carbon reduction and attacking climate change are high priorities. Power generators must include current and potentially new climate-led regulations and laws when planning for the future. This track will contain information on regulations, resource planning, carbon credits or taxes, net-zero carbon emission goals, as well as carbon capture reduction technologies and solutions.

• Climate change
• Environmental regulations
• Carbon costs/taxes
• Carbon credits
• Carbon capture and other clean coal innovations
• Gas-fired emissions reduction
• New gas turbine technologies and innovations
• Economics and financing
• Nuclear power’s future
• Small modular reactors
• Large-scale wind
• Utility-scale solar

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Gas-fired, coal-fired, and nuclear power plants continue to be the workhorses of the U.S. electricity industry, accounting for about 80 percent of the country’s generating capacity. Although new fuels and new types of power plants are gaining ground, many of these conventional plants still have years of life left in them. To compete, however, conventional power plant owners and operators must manage their assets wisely and optimize operations and maintenance with the latest processes and solutions, as well as with a highly trained and adaptive workforce. This track will focus on gas and steam turbines, boilers, heat recovery steam generators, automation, operations and maintenance, supply chain management, uprates, repowering, and plant retirement strategies.

• Best practices in maintenance outages
• Repowering plants
• Strengthening against the elements
• Upgrading parts and plants
• Workforce issues
• Safety
• Equipment upgrades
• Automation systems
• Best practices for gas-fired, nuclear, and coal-fired plants
• Combined cycle HRSGs
• Boilers
• Cooling towers
• Control room
• Compliance challenges
• Remote monitoring
• O&M
• Life cycle management
• Cycling 
• Fuel switching
• Supply chain
• Decommissioning

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The future generation mix will look different than it does now, as utility plot integrated resource plans to get to net-zero carbon in the coming decades. Yet conventional, baseload power, such as gas, nuclear, and maybe even some coal, will remain in the mix for some time to provide reliability, resiliency, and efficiency. The energy transformation is rolling forward with or without governmental insights, so utility and independent power generators are carefully planning how they will move into the future. Utility-scale renewables are favored but have challenges in terms of transmission and distribution grid integration. Distributed resources offer the potential for added resiliency to mission-critical systems.  The 2050 generation portfolios may be carbon-free, but how do utilities and IPPs get there? Presenters in this track will discuss their strategies and plans for the future and share their thoughts and visions for the road ahead.

• The next level in power generation economics
• Regulatory events impacting power generation
• Revenue opportunities
• Power generation interconnection
• Compliance challenges
• How to integrate into the bulk power system
• Market designs that work
• Regulatory barriers and rate reform
• Inverter technologies
• Inverter-based generation challenges
• Microgrids

Sponsored by:

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The POWERGEN and DISTRIBUTECH Leadership Summit track, focused on Destination 2050, was created to provide a platform for energy sector leaders to engage in long-term strategic discussions, focusing on the next 30 years, with the objective of driving forward the energy transition. The Leadership Summit is designed to attract both the electricity generation and delivery audiences and will take place concurrently with both events’ well-established Conference Sessions and Knowledge Hubs, reinforcing the event’s wider content proposition. 

Speakers and panelists will represent utilities, EPCs, OEMs, regulators, investors, and more. These experts from across the ecosystem, seeking solutions to prominent challenges in pursuit of a balanced and sustainable energy mix, will have the opportunity to contribute their thoughts in high-level debates with peers. As they cover the industry’s ambitious journey to ‘Destination 2050’, they will discuss how central station-based generation represents a smaller percentage of capacity and the trend toward more renewable energy and other forms of distributed generation, including energy storage. In addition, they will talk about the changing workforce, evolving customers, policy, regulation, and project financing. 

The inaugural Leadership Summit track will open after the keynote address by Rick Perry, former U.S. Secretary of Energy and Governor of Texas. Former Secretary Perry also will participate with other executives in the Leadership Summit’s first-panel session.

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