All of our legal column writers have this issue off (they’ll be back in the March issue), so we are using this opportunity to invite readers to share their legal and regulatory (L&R) concerns.

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., January 28, 2011 – The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the 112th Congress won’t be your father’s Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee (and certainly not Lisa Murkowski’s father’s committee). With a slew of newcomers – mostly Republican – and none of them particularly attuned to the way […]

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, President Barack Obama set a new goal for the nation: To obtain 80% of its electricity from “clean energy” by 2035. But his definition of “clean energy” included “nuclear, clean coal, and natural gas” as well as “wind and solar.”

A federal district court judge on Thursday sided with environmental groups in a suit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and gave the Obama administration only 30 extra days to issue Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) rules for large and small boilers, and solid waste and sewage sludge incinerators—not a year, as the agency had sought.

The New Mexico Supreme Court today ruled unanimously that freshly elected Republican Gov. Susana Martinez violated the state constitution when she halted publication of cap-and-trade rules that were adopted by the state’s Environmental Improvement Board (EIB) last year.

The European Union (EU) on Tuesday said it was waiting for member countries to confirm that minimum-security requirements had been installed in their emissions registries before reactivating its emissions trading scheme (ETS). The European Commission halted spot carbon trading last week for at least seven days after hackers stole emission permits from accounts in the Czech Republic and Austria.

Massachusetts–based Beacon Power Corp. on Monday said it had energized and grid-interconnected the first 8 MW of flywheel energy storage at its 20-MW frequency regulation plant in Stephentown, N.Y., bringing in the first commercial revenue for the company.

NRG Energy last week received a $967 million federal loan guarantee for its 290-MW Agua Caliente thin-film photovoltaic (PV) solar project. When the Yuma County, Ariz., project, which began construction in 2010, is complete in 2014, NRG says it will be the largest PV generation facility in the world.

The fourth unit of India’s Kaiga Generating Station, a 220-MW indigenous reactor that achieved first criticality on Nov. 27, 2010, was synchronized to the grid last week. The unit now brings India’s nuclear power capacity to 4,780 MW with 20 reactors in operation, state-owned Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) said.

The U.S. Departments of Energy and Commerce on Thursday signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to collaborate further on renewable energy modeling and weather forecasting to help the renewable sector more effectively use the nation’s resources.