Legal & Regulatory

Gas turbines are expensive. Although peaking units aren’t as costly as baseload units, letting them sit idle is still a waste. Yet that is what peaking units spend nearly all their time doing. Some operators only fire up their units a few days a year. That is like putting money in the bank and collecting interest a few hours at a time, rather than all year round. That strategy only works when the payback is extremely high for those short periods.

Energy professionals and the general population are both acutely aware of the explosion of a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) natural gas pipeline in San Bruno, Calif., that led to the death of eight people and the total destruction of 38 homes in September 2010. The tragic accident garnered immediate national attention, thrusting the natural gas industry into the spotlight. The California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC) Independent Review Panel neatly encapsulated the sentiment surrounding the event: “The fact that a large segment of pipe literally blew out of the ground in an urban neighborhood and the residents were generally unaware of the proximity of a high-pressure natural gas transmission system to their homes—raises significant public safety concerns.”

As less is heard about the promise of new nuclear reactors in the U.S., more is being heard about the problems of the geriatric atomic set.

Water has long been energy production’s silent partner. In the past, we Americans seemed to take it for granted that plentiful water supplies would be available for a variety of energy needs ranging from the operations of coal-fired power plants to natural gas production activities.

As last winter’s abundant snowfall in the Pacific Northwest melted, rivers swelled and hydroelectric operators enjoyed substantial increases in generation. That bountiful clean and cheap power generation was a blessing, but it also triggered a host of legal issues.

Quin Shea, vice president, environment for the Edison Electric Institute, comments on the Utility MACT rule that is expected to be finalized in November.

What’s on the agenda for the utility industry today and into the future? Platts and Capgemini asked the industry leadership in their latest survey. The answers revolve around regulation, finance, and human resources.

Uncertainty about China’s role in world trade and its current monopoly over critical rare earth minerals continues to roil supply chains in energy technology markets. Will the World Trade Organization bring China into the fold, or will China ignore the international forum that it lobbied hard to join several years ago?

From the East Coast to the Lone Star State, a number of elected officials and power industry representatives are bashing the new aggressive regulation aimed at controlling specific power plant emissions. Complying with a federal court mandate, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) on July 6. The new […]

It is time for the renewable integration discussion to move beyond simply identifying the challenges of ensuring reliability in a nation increasingly served by intermittent renewable resources and toward developing real-world solutions to these challenges.