By David Wagman, Managing Editor

Katherine Hornbostel of Houston. Elliott Leonard of Aurora, Colo. Christopher Waybright of Spokane, Wash. Thomas Russell, Jr. of Warrenton, Mo.

These four high school seniors are the first to receive Next Generation Scholarship Fund scholarships.

The Fund, in its inaugural year, awards $5,000 academic scholarships to students planning to pursue studies in college that will lead them to a career in the electric power generation industry.

Katherine, Elliott, Christopher and Thomas were the top four finalists, selected as part of a competitive application process that attracted dozens of applications from high schools nationwide.

The scholarship’s intent is to be proactive in addressing a portion of the workforce development issue facing the electric generation sector. The Fund is sustained through the tax-deductible financial support of some of the most progressive-thinking companies and organizations in the power generation industry. Those include Alstom Power, the American Boiler Manufacturers Association, Bechtel Power, CH2M Hill, Earl Beckwith & Associates, the Edison Electric Institute, EXCEL Services Corp., Exelon Generation, General Physics and Pratt & Whitney Power Systems. (You can join that list by visiting www.jets.org and following the link to the scholarship donation form.)

The fund is sponsored by Power Engineering magazine and is administered by the Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS), a non-profit organization whose aim for the past 50 years has been to encourage young people to pursue careers in engineering. All of the money the scholarship fund receives is directed toward scholarships. The more we receive, the more we give away in scholarships.

In this the fund’s inaugural year more than 50 high school seniors wrote essays as part of a competitive process to be considered for the academic scholarships. JETS narrowed the list to 12 finalists. (Having read all 12, I wish we could have awarded scholarships to everyone.) The fund’s Steering Committee-made up of executives from our industry who graciously volunteered their time-reviewed the finalists’ application materials and selected Katherine, Elliott, Christopher and Thomas as scholarship winners.

Steering committee members include Bob Allen of CH2M Hill, Bob Palmer of Bechtel, Joe Nasal of General Physics, Larry Jaworski of Black & Veatch, Nancy Mohn of Alstom and Jamie Matlin of PennEnergy JOBS. Claude Charron, a teacher at Gulliver Schools in Florida, Megan Balkovic of JETS and yours truly also are on the committee.

The scholarship will be awarded in chunks over the four years of the winning students’ college career. They will receive $1,000 apiece in their freshman year, $1,000 in their sophomore year, $1,500 in their junior year and $1,500 in their senior year. At the end of each academic year the students will reapply for the scholarship. After all, we want to make sure our recipients remain committed to studying an engineering discipline that will lead to a career in the power generation industry.

To help our scholarship winners stay interested in our industry, we are developing a mentoring program. Consider this your invitation to have your company or organization take part. How can you be involved? By agreeing to be listed as an organization willing to offer internships or summer jobs to our scholarship winners. Or perhaps by agreeing to stay in touch with the scholars to help keep them interested in our industry and thinking about the career possibilities that will await them once they enter the workforce. I am building a list of mentor organizations right now. Drop me a note at davidw@pennwell.com to be included.

And while you’re at it, join me in congratulating Katherine, Elliott, Christopher and Thomas. They represent a bit of the next generation that we all are hoping to build.

Power Engineering is launching a new monthly Podcast. You’ll hear our editors interview power industry leaders on current topics and issues, as well as offer opinion pieces and commentary. Power Engineering Podcasts are informative, free and available for downloading at www.power-eng.com.

Why Bother?

By Steve Blankinship, Associate Editor

One day back in the mid-1980s I was sitting in the office of the man in charge of generation for a major Texas power company. My job was writing press releases and responses to issues regarding the company’s lignite plants, which over the preceding 15 years had grown from nothing to almost 5,500 MW.

On this particular day, we were considering how to respond to the latest charge that we were destroying the environment and endangering human health. The company had built a 5,000-acre lake to cool three 750 MW lignite units. Like most of the company’s lakes, it had been built as a multi-purpose reservoir that supplied condensate cooling for the plant’s turbines and also provided a place to swim, boat, ski and fish. State wildlife agencies stocked the lake with game fish, much to the delight of fisherman.

But sampling had started to indicate the lake contained trace amounts of selenium from lignite used at the plant. Over time, selenium could be absorbed by fish in the lake and transferred to humans who ate them. Running some theoretical worst-case scenario numbers, if someone ate around 10 pounds of fish from the lake every week for many years, the additional selenium that might be present in the fish could cause them to have a slightly higher rate of tooth decay than might otherwise be expected.

The Texas attorney general, who planned a run for governor in the next election, expressed serious concern over this potential threat to public health. An environmental lawyer on his staff drafted a letter that the attorney general sent to the company suggesting the following remedy: In exchange for the attorney general not pursuing legal recourse on the discharge of trace amounts of selenium into the lake, the power company could drain the lake, dredge it, refill it and add equipment to make sure selenium never found its way into the water again.

This would have required shutting down 2,250 MW of baseload power capacity for several years and charging customers untold millions of dollars in additional power costs stemming from replacement power predicated on natural gas. There would also be the cost of performing the procedure itself.

As we pondered our response to this suggestion, it occurred to me that I had seen selenium tablets at the drugstore. Selenium is sold as a dietary supplement and is included in many multivitamin tablets taken daily by millions of people to improve their health. We eventually included this fact in the response I wrote.

Before the meeting closed the executive said something that haunts me to this day. In retrospect, it represents to me a seminal moment for all of us in that room and, more importantly, by other utilities in Texas and elsewhere. That’s because I suspect similar Kafkaesque scenes were taking place at other utilities across the U.S.

The executive shook his head, then said, “Why do we even bother?” He went on to talk about how the company could have just kept building gas plants and passing along the much higher costs of fueling them to customers who would have to pay up. Up to that time, the lignite plants had saved customers many billions of dollars compared to what they would have paid if all plants had continued to run on gas. Those present that day talked about whether anyone really knew or really cared about any of this. Our consensus was they didn’t.

That company hasn’t built any more lignite or coal plants since, although it now appears they will build a couple that were shelved about the time of the Great Selenium Scare. Momentum was already building to introduce wholesale power market competition. Under pressure from large industrial customers and Enron, Texas power utilities decided to abdicate building power capacity to others, all of whom would build the cheapest plants possible for the quickest return-on-investment (ROI). Gas, in other words. The utilities would simply buy the power from non-utility providers and pass the cost along to the customer, whatever it turned out to be. Utilities would no longer have to deal with building and operating the politically incorrect plants that are almost always cheaper in the long run for consumers.

The result was complete deregulation of the Texas power market based on cheap-to-build but potentially very-expensive-to-operate natural gas plants. That has made Texas a power market driven by natural gas prices. Back in 1980, Texas had a balanced generation portfolio composed of nearly equal parts of lignite (and coal), nuclear and natural gas. Back then, Texas had low-to-moderate power prices. Today, it is rapidly becoming one of the highest-priced power markets in the U.S.

Our selenium scare ended happily. The company didn’t have to drain the lake that would have not existed if it hadn’t built it in the first place. State health officials wisely removed its selenium advisory and newer water treatment technologies reduced the human health threat to the point that a person would have to eat tons of bass from the cooling lake to get an extra cavity. And the attorney general who sought to protect people from something they could buy at the health food store got elected governor.

There’s a cautionary lesson here. Affordable and reliable sources of electricity are absolutely essential to our economic health. Affordable power is essential to our physical health too. Games such as the one I recite here are still being played. Unfortunately, the time we have for such games is running out.