POWERGEN International 2024 to Kick Off in New Orleans

POWERGEN International 2024 in New Orleans opens its doors tomorrow at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, held Jan. 23 – Jan. 25. The show brings together folks from the power-generation sector as well as utilities, engineering, procurement, and construction (EPCs), OEMs, and energy users. The theme of this year's show is Destination 2050 and is supported by several tracks: Knowledge Hubs in the exhibit hall, Mega Sessions on sector-critical topics, the Technical Program, Workshops, Breakfast Roundtables, and more.

Turbomachinery International will be covering many of the technical sessions in addition to our exclusive video coverage and on-the-show-floor interviews.

Keynote Address

Tuesday kicks off with the keynote address, held from 8 – 10 a.m. in the Great Hall, featuring Brian David Johnson, Futurist, Author, and Professor; Bradford Crabtree, Assistant Secretary for DOE Fossil Energy and Carbon Management; Deanna Rodriguez, President and CEO, Entergy New Orleans, LLC; and Todd Noe, Director of Nuclear Technologies Engineering, Microsoft.

Technical Sessions

Also on Tuesday, Jan. 22, John Marion, Sr. Program Director of Carbon Management & Conversion at GTI Energy, will host a session that highlights the STEP Demo supercritical CO₂ project. The session will share the status and results of the 2023 commissioning and preview the next steps to reconfigure the pilot facility for recompression Brayton Cycle testing.

Marc Lemmons from the Electric Power Research Institute will discuss co-firing technical challenges and the latest large-scale hydrogen projects in his session on The Future of Hydrogen and Ammonia Firing.

In the afternoon, Mark Scherluebbe, Managing Director at EY Parthenon, will present on Transforming Older Plants for a Decarbonized Energy Future. The talk will feature a utility that will discuss its key considerations in driving plant performance, including combined-cycle technologies, advanced emission controls, use of natural water resources for cooling, and more.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is all the buzz. As such, Tara Singleton, a Performance Engineer at Evergy, Aimee Mills, the Senior Manager of External Communications at the Electric Power Research Institute, and Neel Parikh, Project Manager at Siemens Energy, are presenting on Make the Most Out of AI and Machine Learning. The trio will discuss the implementation approaches and experiences of closed-loop optimizer solutions—which reduce the need for manual adjustments and provide consistency in unit operation—at several U.S. power plants, including long-term operational trends such as heat-rate improvements and NOx emission reductions.

On Wednesday, Jan. 24, the technical session, Small Modular Reactor (SMR) Technology and Market Overview, will provide attendees with an overview of SMR basics, including use cases and technology differences for light-water SMRs, advanced reactors, and microreactors. You can check out our current coverage of micro-reactors here in our recent podcast with Rolls-Royce.

Benjamin Emerson, Senior Research Engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology, is hosting Insights on Low-Carbon Fuels for Power Generation, which will detail technical issues, common questions, and misconceptions surrounding hydrogen and ammonia as fuels.

Ramiro Eduardo Aban Muñoz, Head of Operational Control at Pampa Energia, and two others are presenting Digital Monitoring of Gas Turbines: an independent energy company in Argentina will showcase its predictive maintenance strategy and how it helped the company avoid major component failures and high costs from unavailability.

Stay tuned for live video coverage, video interviews, session coverage, and exclusive interviews. Check out our social to stay connected and in the know!