Energy Secretary Rick Perry on March 22 said his department will guarantee up to $3.7 billion in additional loans to finance continued construction of two new nuclear reactors at the Vogtle plant in Georgia. While Perry and other government officials stressed the importance of the project to the U.S. nuclear industry, critics called it a […]

A German business magazine reports that Siemens is exploring options for its struggling gas turbine business, and could look to form a joint venture with Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI). Manager Magazin on March 21 said Siemens “wants to accommodate the large turbine business of the Japanese Mitsubishi Group and in the future hold only a […]

Energy Secretary Rick Perry will reportedly announce March 22 that the Trump administration will finalize $3.7 billion in loan guarantees to support completion of the Vogtle nuclear plant construction project. The announcement is expected when Perry visits the site near Waynesboro, Georgia, on Friday along with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Southern Co. CEO Tom […]

A report from an independent market monitor for PJM Interconnection shows that natural gas-fired power generation topped coal-fired output in PJM in 2018, the first time that gas has topped coal in the history of the largest U.S. grid operator. The “2018 State of the Market” report from Monitoring Analytics LLC, which includes Volume 1 […]

Dominion Energy has reached an agreement with utilities in Connecticut to keep the Millstone Power Station, the state’s only nuclear power plant, in service for at least another decade. Dominion announced the deal March 15, the deadline the company had to tell ISO New England, the regional grid operator, whether it would retire the two […]

Westmoreland Coal Co., the nation’s largest independent coal producer, announced March 15 that it has emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy and will operate as a new, privately held company. The company, headquartered in Englewood, Colorado, near Denver, said its assets, including three mines in Montana, are now owned and operated by Westmoreland Mining LLC, a […]

The chief executive of Vistra Energy Corp. last week said coal is not likely to regain market share in the U.S. power market. Curtis Morgan, in a panel discussion March 14 at the CERAWeek event in Houston, Texas, said “coal is on its way out. More and more plants are being retired.” It’s not the […]

Florida Power & Light (FPL) continues to add to its solar power portfolio, with the utility on March 13 announcing plans to build the largest community solar program in the U.S. Eric Silagy, FPL’s president and CEO, in a statement said, “We’ve been aggressively expanding solar with one goal in mind: bringing more solar to […]

The U.S. has agreed to build six nuclear power plants in India, according to a joint statement from the two countries issued March 13 in Washington, D.C. The countries held two days of talks this week, discussing international security and nuclear cooperation. The talks involved Andrea Thompson, the U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control […]

Nathan Myhrvold, the long-time polymath idea man for Bill Gates, his former boss at Microsoft, on March 12 told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) annual regulatory information conference, “Energy is the fulcrum that gives leverage to human ingenuity.” Nuclear, he said, must be a large part of providing that leverage to the world. Myhrvold, speaking […]