Hydro

A severe water crisis gripping India this year has forced several of the country’s hydroelectric and thermal power plants to shut down. At least 10 of India’s 29 states have been stricken by severe drought after the monsoons failed for two seasons in a row (as of the start of July, the monsoons had still […]

The U.S., Mexico, and Canada today announced an unprecedented goal to procure 50% of North America’s total power generation from renewables, nuclear, carbon capture and storage (CCS), and energy efficiency technologies by 2025. President Obama, Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau, and the President of Mexico Enrique Peña Nieto, announced the continental goal, part of […]

  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has unveiled details of the Clean Energy Incentive Program (CEIP), a voluntary measure central to the judicially stalled Clean Power Plan that seeks to provide guidance to states and tribes that want to meet goals under the plan when it becomes effective. The final Clean Power Plan, finalized in […]

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (MPUC) approved Minnesota Power Co.’s integrated resource plan (IRP) on June 9, which calls for the economic idling of the company’s Taconite Harbor Energy Center—a two-unit 150-MW facility (Unit 3 was retired in June 2015)—this fall and ceasing coal operations at the site in 2020. The MPUC also adjusted the […]

China unveiled its 13th Five-Year Plan this March. The official proposal that will guide the country’s economic and social development from 2016 through 2020 lays out targets and other measures to address a number of climate change, air pollution, and water policies that will build on progress to transform its power sector. The plan sets […]

Droughts attributed to the El Niño phenomenon have gripped Venezuela’s neighbor Colombia. Bogotá in April prepared to ration power and instituted mandatory reductions in consumption, warning that

Oil-rich Venezuela is gripped by a power crisis so debilitating that the government has instituted four-hour daily blackouts across most of the country, forced hotels and malls to generate their own power, and

The world’s frenzied economic growth through 2040 won’t be matched by electricity demand growth, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) says in the International Energy Outlook 2016 (IEO2016 ) released on May 11. World net electricity generation will jump 69% by 2040, the IEO2016 reference case projects, but that is still well below “what it would […]

Hands down, 2015 was a record year for global investment in renewable energy. Excluding large hydroelectric projects, the amount of money committed to renewables rose 5%, to $285.9 billion, exceeding the previous record of $278.5 billion reached in 2011.

South Africa’s power system is preparing to receive a critical capacity boost. In March, state-owned utility Eskom grid-synchronized the first of four units of the Ingula Pumped Storage project in