California Gov. Jerry Brown and members of the California legislature have agreed on a package of “sweeping” reforms designed to overhaul the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), increase transparency, and change how the CPUC conducts much of its business. The changes come in the wake of repeated disclosures of illegal ex parte meetings and communications […]

At least one person was injured when a boiler exploded at the Veolia Energy Schuylkill Station combined heat and power plant in Philadelphia on June 15. The 163-MW natural gas–fired plant provides steam for the city’s district heating system as well as power to the grid. According to media reports, the blast occurred around 3:15 […]

Power News   Current Issue | Find a Job | Post a Job Experts: Gas Power's Expansion Riddled with Roadblocks   Even though it may dominate forecasts, natural gas–fired generation faces a troubled expansion in the U.S., according to experts from a variety of stake-holding entities—including an industry group, a utility, a generator, and a […]

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) controversial Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) survived another day as the U.S. Supreme Court on June 13 declined to review the D.C. Circuit’s decision to leave the rule in place while the EPA revises it to comply with a 2015 Supreme Court ruling. The 2015 decision sent MATS back […]

Michigan utility DTE Energy announced on June 8 that it would retire a total of eight aging coal-fired units at three of its plants by 2023. The units slated for retirement are located at the 651-MW River Rouge plant, the 536-MW Trenton Channel plant (Figure), and the 1,547-MW St. Clair plant. All three are located in […]

Fresh on the heels of its decision to finally move ahead with the long-anticipated retirements of the Quad Cities and Clinton nuclear plants in Illinois, Exelon officials told an Iowa newspaper that its Byron and Three Mile Island (TMI) plants face the same challenges and could be forced into retirement without changes to markets and […]

Domestic uranium production is falling to levels not seen since the early 2000s, which are themselves equal to production during the dawn of the nuclear age in the 1950s. Prospects for any sort of rebound look bleak, as a joint venture between GE, Hitachi, and Toshiba is looking to import Russian-designed fuel assemblies for use in […]

Talen Energy, which owns a portion of the Colstrip Power Plant in Montana and operates the plant for the five other utilities and holding companies that also own shares, told the other owners on May 23 that it plans to exit as operator by May 2018 because it is losing too much money. The huge […]

Power News   Current Issue | Find a Job | Post a Job Fuel Cells Could Be a "Game-Changer" for Carbon Capture Fuel cells powered by natural gas, biogas, and hydrogen are a rapidly expanding option for distributed generation, with fuel cell­­–based power plants being deployed in capacities into tens of megawatts. But as the […]

The Department of Energy (DOE) is ready to end its involvement with the Texas Clean Energy Project (TCEP), a carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) facility under development in west Texas, a move that would effectively shut the project down, according to its backers. Along with FutureGen, Hydrogen Energy California (HECA), and NRG’s Petra Nova […]