3) 4th Daughter Directive of Ambient Air Quality Framework Directive Published
Andris Piebalgs, within the new commission responsible for energy, has recently stressed the importance of coal for Europe¿s future electricity supply. In a public speech, he announced support for a revived clean coal financing under the 7th EU Framework Programme for Research and Development.Taking up widespread industry recommendations, he proposed the construction of a "lighthouse" demo plant as a public-private partnership. VGB has pooled these efforts under the Emax initiative.
http://www.vgb.org/news_e_piebalgs-lang-en.html
As every year VGB-FORSCHUNGSSTIFTUNG (Research Foundation) requests your pro-posals for awarding the 10,000 EUR Heinrich-Mandel Prize to young engineers from practi-cal fields of work or science. Candidates should not be older than 35 years. This year the prize is awarded on the occasion of the VGB Congress in Krakau. Deadline for proposals is March 31, 2005.
http://www.vgb.org/research_mandel-lang-en.html
On 26. January 2005 the "Directive 2004/107/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 December 2004 relating to arsenic, cadmium, mercury, nickel and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in ambient air" was published. The Directive sets target values for the a.m. pollutants - with the exception of mercury which only has to be measured - which have "to be attained as far as possible" in the Member States. The target values are the same as already mentioned in former drafts, 6 ng/m³ for arsenic, 5 ng/m³ for cadmium, 20 ng/m³ for Nickel and 1 ng/m³ for benzo(a)pyrene, measured as total content in the PM10 fraction averaged over a calendar year. They are not to be considered as environmental quality standards according to the IPPC Directive and would not require any measures entailing disproportionate costs or - for industrial installations - measures stricter than BAT; in particular they "would not lead to the closure of installations". The Directive has to be transposed into national law by 15 February 2007; the target values shall not be exceeded as from 31 December 2012.
More information:
V. Hamacher, Phone: +49 201 8128-320
mailto:volker.hamacher@vgb.org
The VGB-Working Panel "Performance Indicators" defined new performance indicators for the assessment of the operation behaviour of power plants in the European liberalized power market. CO2-Indicator (Trade of Certificates); CHP-Indicator; Schedule reliability; Schedule capacity; Load dispatcher outage rate; Load dispatcher reliability; Energy availability during peak-periods; Energy reliability; Time availability during peak-loads; Time reliability; Commercial reliability; Number of start ups. The draft version (German language only) are available on VGB-Website within the public area, WP-Performance Indicators (File: Neue Betriebskennwerte.pdf). Any comments/proposals for further complementing might be send to the responsible secretary.
https://www.vgb.org/kennwerte.html