By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., December 8, 2010 — Rebuffing the Tea Party contingent and right wing gas bags such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, House Republicans have picked Michigander Fred Upton to chair the all-important House Energy and Commerce Committee in the 112th Congress. Upton, who has represented the southwestern corner of Michigan […]

Ten European Union (EU) countries last week signed a memorandum of understanding  to develop an offshore energy grid linking renewable wind energy sources in the North Sea and put it into operation by 2020. The nations also committed to working together to overcome the regulatory, legal, market, planning, and technical issues involved in creating a North Sea grid.

PJM Interconnection, a regional transmission organization that ensures the reliability of eastern U.S. high-voltage grids, last week approved $1.25 billion in transmission improvements, including a capacity improvement project to rebuild one of the most heavily used transmission lines in PJM.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear challenges from five major power companies on a federal appeals court decision that ruled they could be sued, under a federal “public nuisance” law, to curb greenhouse gas emissions, which allegedly cause entity-harming climate changes. Industry experts say the case will likely be heard by the high court next April, and a decision could be made as early as June.

More than 52 GW—16%—of the existing U.S. coal-fired generation fleet will be retired rather than face the cost of compliance with pending air quality regulations between 2015 and 2020, engineering and consulting firm Black & Veatch predicted in its end-of-year Energy Market Forecast.

India’s Atomic Energy Commission and its state-owned Nuclear Power Corp. of India Limited (NPCIL) on Monday signed major agreements with France’s AREVA for the construction of two EPR reactors—the first of a series of 6—at Jaitapur in the western state of Maharashtra.

Dominion Virginia Power last week struck a deal with the National Park Service and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to close a 74-MW West Virginia coal-fired plant as part of plans to build a new 1,300-MW natural gas–fired power station in northwestern Virginia.

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., December 1, 2010 – At this point, probably only one person in America believes that Lisa Murkowski did not win Alaska’s November election to the U.S. Senate. Unfortunately, that one person is defeated Republican nominee Joe Miller, who refuses to drop what has become an entirely quixotic effort to stave […]

A long-awaited Clean Air Act regulatory guidance document released by the Environmental Protection Agency recommends that state air regulators strongly emphasize energy efficiency in determining the most cost-effective and technically feasible greenhouse gas control technologies that must be used by utilities and other major industrial emitters when expanding existing facilities or building new ones.

The Linde Group is a world-leading gases and engineering company operating in more than 100 countries. It’s no surprise that the company uses a variety of advanced monitoring techniques and equipment to keep its plants operating reliably. In the U.S. and UK particularly, Linde plants have used online machine condition monitoring for a number of years. At its Shanghai headquarters, Linde has formed a large and impressive remote operations center where it monitors and tracks the process operations of all its major gas plants in China 24 hours a day.