As officials often point out, they cannot deploy a soldier or marine for each mile of power or pipeline.
Backers hope they will prove a cheaper alternative to helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft for tasks as varied as power and pipeline inspection, mapping, security, border surveillance, research, filming, fire fighting, search and rescue and delivering supplies.
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American Electric will utilize the pipeline to fuel its power plants, which will be converted from coal-fired to natural gas in order to comply with tightening environmental standards.
Generally, the participants at the FERC hearings all expressed a preference for better sharing of information concerning pipeline capacity scheduled for power generation, individual power plant burn rates, fast notification of major operational changes, and coordination of maintenance work to both systems.
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The company's chief executive, Rupert Soames, said there had been a strong order intake and a healthy pipeline of inquiries about hiring power units.
She said 2010 had also been a "tremendous year" for the renewable power sector, with more wind power developments in the planning and construction pipeline.
Duke views every asset, whether it's a pipeline or a 500-megawatt power plant, as holding both intrinsic and extrinsic value.
China recently completed a 1, 100-mile gas pipeline to connect its factories and power plants to the vast gas reserves of Central Asia, part of China's stiff competition with Europe over a key energy source.
Intel has more than a dozen designs in the pipeline based on the new low-power offering.
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In the wreckage was Oasis pipeline, a unit of the wounded power and natural gas distributor Aquila.
Investors in the so-called public-private partnership include Russian Railways, national power utility Unified Energy System and state-controlled pipeline operator Transneft.
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Saddled with out-of-date factories, over-reliance on the North American market and unfashionable trucks, a poor reputation for quality, a dearth of new models in the pipeline and insufficient resources to fund future power-train development, Chrysler is too weak and too small to survive on its own.
If the proportion of imported pipeline gas falls, so does the pricing power of conventional suppliers, even if the overall volume they supply goes up.
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Our technologies and services include: surface and subsea drilling and production, monitoring and diagnostics, measurement and controls, large-scale LNG, pipeline compression and inspection, well site and industrial power generation, technologies for the refining and petrochemical industries, and modular CNG and LNG units for transportation sectors.
Becoming bigger may not necessarily solve the pipeline problem, but it certainly helps you to match the increasing power of your customers.
For First Solar, the acquisition of Solar Chile gives the Arizona-based photovoltaic panel manufacturer and developer a big pipeline of projects to keep its factories humming while collecting development and operation fees from the construction of solar power plants.
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