A federal court on Tuesday ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) exceeded its authority when it established a screening tool that could allow some new power plants to be exempted from certain requirements under the EPA’s October 2010-finalized rule aimed at curbing emissions of particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter.

A proposal released by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Friday could require owners of the 2.3-GW coal-fired Navajo Generating Station (NGS) near the Arizona-Utah state line to install emission controls worth $1.1 billion to improve visibility at 11 national parks and wilderness areas in the Southwest.

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) on Friday narrowly approved a determination that U.S. industry is materially injured or threatened with material injury by imports of unfairly subsidized utility-scale wind towers from China and Vietnam. The ITC’s determination gives the Department of Commerce the green light to issue antidumping and countervailing duty orders on imports of those products from the two countries.

Once a world leader in innovation and manufacturing of clean energy technologies, the U.S. now faces significant competitive challenges from Europe and Asia, and it lags behind other nations on measures that include renewables deployment, manufacturing, and innovation, a new report suggests.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to review challenges to a 2010 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule setting the acceptable limit for sulfur dioxide (SO2) in the air at 75 parts per billion (ppb) over a 1-hour period. The denial of certiorari leaves intact the EPA’s final revision to the primary National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for SO2 emissions from power plants and other industrial facilities.

The first official day of committee activity in the 113th Congress saw the advancement of two hydropower bills with bipartisan support in the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday proposed four reforms intended to reduce the time and cost to process transmission interconnection requests from generating facilities of 20 MW or smaller. The reforms would boost reliability by increasing energy supply and remove hurdles in the development of new renewable power sources, FERC said.

Among the surprises in President Barack Obama’s second Inaugural Address on Monday was his promise to address the challenges of climate change and sustainable energy. An independent draft report released about a week earlier on climate change and its impacts in the U.S. may have helped to fuel his renewed resolve on these intertwined issues.

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 19 January 2013 — This is a story without much significance beyond the usual cautionary tale about bureaucracies, which hardly needs retelling. But it is amusing nonetheless. So I present for your amusement and edification, the tale of the vanishing nuclear plants. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which watches over […]

The Department of Energy (DOE) quietly unveiled a new strategy for the management and disposal of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel on Friday. The strategy calls for a phased, consent-based approach to siting and implementing a nuclear waste management and disposal system, and it endorses building a pilot interim storage facility by 2021.