Legal & Regulatory

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 […]

An estimated 91% of U.S. coal power plants that submitted groundwater monitoring data as required by the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) 2015 Coal Combustion Residuals (CCR) rule have unsafe levels of one or more contaminants, a collaborative analysis of the monitoring data by several environmental groups suggests.  The March 4 report is significant because power […]

COMMENTARY Are power purchase and similar agreements excluded from the automatic stay under the safe harbor for forward contracts? Both the FirstEnergy Solutions and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) bankruptcies have seen proceedings regarding power purchase and similar agreements (PPAs) that raise this question. Contracts often contain provisions that enable a party to terminate or modify […]

The New York-based hedge fund aiming to take over New Mexico’s San Juan Generating Station (SJGS), targeted for closure by state lawmakers, wants to refit the 46-year-old, coal-fired plant to use carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. Acme Equities LLC said last week that retrofitting the 847-MW plant with CCS technology would cut carbon emissions […]

After the Great Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami, and ensuing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March 2011, Japan issued stringent safety regulations and reviews that affected its entire 50-reactor fleet. It meant that as each Japanese nuclear reactor entered its scheduled maintenance and refueling outage, it could not returned to operation until restart […]

If you’ve been following the news, you know that Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection because it is facing tens of billions of dollars in liability for

Eight years after Germany decided it would halt nuclear power production by 2022, the country that relied on lignite and hard coal for 38% of its generated power in 2018 will phase out coal by 2038 or earlier

America’s energy mix is undergoing a period of rapid change. The way we generate electricity in this country looks dramatically different than it did just a decade ago, as wind and solar have matured and

The Senate on February 28 officially confirmed Andrew Wheeler to be administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on a 52–47 vote, mostly along party lines. The nomination of Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, was controversial, with many lawmakers and environmentalists criticizing his ties to the coal industry.  Wheeler has held the role in an acting […]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will refrain from amending the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for sulfur dioxide (SO2), retaining a 2010 rule, which it said adequately protects public health.  The agency on Feb. 25 said in a notice that a periodically required review of the primary—or health-based—rule concluded no revision was necessary. The […]