French nuclear giant AREVA on Monday announced it would sell its lucrative transmission and distribution (T&D) division to Alstom and Schneider Electric—both French firms—for €4.09 billion, rejecting bids from U.S.-based General Electric and Japan’s Toshiba Corp.

The week brought news of more closures or cancellations related to coal-fired generation. Exelon Corp. said it would permanently shut down four older units—a total capacity of 933 MW—in Pennsylvania; Progress Energy announced the closure of 11 North Carolina units in a shift to burning natural gas; and cost increases for an Ohio plant are prompting American Municipal Power to consider a combined-cycle gas plant instead.

An analysis released today by the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) projects that if Congress adopts climate change legislation based on a blueprint released by the organization earlier this year, the nation’s economy would grow about 70% through 2030 despite adopting carbon emission–curbing measures.

As director of public policy analysis in my last seven years at Enron, I participated in many legislative and regulatory debates involving electricity, although the public policy thrust of the company was the opposite of what I believed. While I favored free markets, the business model of Ken Lay (a PhD economist with years of Washington regulatory experience) centered on special government favor. Enron, for example, had seven profit centers geared to government pricing/rationing of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. And in the 1990s, the company was squarely behind a Btu tax. Today, Enron would be pushing cap and trade.

Assume, for the moment, that the U.S. Congress is unable to agree on legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions from industry, vehicles, and power plants (the carrot approach). Further, assume that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) eventually promulgates rules that require power plants to reduce carbon emissions (the stick approach). Have you given any thought to the range of possible best available control technologies (BACT) that the EPA might require under the Clean Air Act (CAA)?

Concerns raised by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) about the structural strength of Westinghouse Electric Co.’s AP1000 reactor could cause delays for several nuclear plants that planned to use the design in the U.S. — and it raises questions for new builds started or proposed in China and the UK.

Rebuilding aged feedwater heaters can make better economic sense than buying new ones, because rebuilding reduces capital cost and plant outage expenses. At one Texas generating station, rebuilding saved one-third the cost of a new feedwater heater while improving the plant’s heat rate.

(Web supplement to "Assessing the Earthquake Risk of Enhanced Geothermal Systems.") The future of geothermal energy will be driven by six primary technologies, but each will pose its own challenges.

On October 16, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals revived a lawsuit filed by residents along the Mississippi Gulf coast against several corporations in the energy, fossil fuels, and chemicals industries alleging that the defendants were responsible for property damage caused by Hurricane Katrina — Comer v. Murphy Oil USA, et al., No. 07-60756 (5th Cir. Oct. 16, 2009).

Argentina has set out to complete Atucha II, a nuclear reactor it started building in 1981 and abandoned when it was 81% complete, owing to financial problems. If all goes according to plan, the country’s third reactor could go online by 2011—some 25 years behind schedule.