Markets

The U.S. took a big step toward becoming a major exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in 2016 as Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass export terminal in Louisiana came online early last year and upgrades to the Panama Canal that opened in June made shipments to the Pacific region considerably easier. Data from the Department of […]

The 2,250-MW Navajo Generating Station near Page, Ariz., and the associated Kayenta coal mine may close in 2017.

Just as the election of Donald J. Trump could result in redirected energy policy in the U.S., 2017 elections in France and Germany could reshape plans for electricity infrastructure on the European continent. Also on both continents, some factors and trends will be out of elected officials’ control. “Difficult to see. Always in motion is […]

The past year saw an astonishing number of mergers, acquisitions, and business reconfigurations of electricity and energy companies, without any obvious organizing theory. Is it possible to make sense of the activity, or is it just business Brownian motion—aka, random behavior?  Gas companies spun off power generating assets. Power companies sold offshore businesses. Independent generators […]

Difficult market conditions have accelerated the much-hyped closures of a string of coal-fired power units in the U.S., but the phenomenon is extending overseas, gripping plants in Australia and Germany. In the wake of the Paris agreement in December 2015, a number of governments have moved to phase out coal-fired generation. This October, France, which […]

Japanese Firms Poised to Build Two 540-MW IGCC Plants Based on Nakoso Technology. A consortium of Japanese firms on December 1 said they had received full-turnkey orders for two integrated gasification

The U.S. market for electricity is trifurcated. More than half the country is served by competitive generators bidding against each other in wholesale markets. Almost half is served by conventional state-regulated, vertically integrated utilities controlling generation and transmission. The rest, a much smaller portion, consists of government-owned and customer-owned utilities, some of which are generators […]

The Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) launched its 51st State Initiative in 2014 with a simple question: What if there were no predefined electricity market? No rules. No market designs. No policies. No subsidies for any type of energy resource. Just a grid to deliver electric power from a variety of sources. And customers. Plenty […]

A tumultuous election year that was marked by market turmoil, the events of 2016 clearly showed that big change is afoot for the power sector. Many of POWER‘s bold predictions for 2016, such as that the near-simultaneous surge in U.S. natural gas production and recent enactment of environmental rules would reshape the U.S. power sector, […]

Some of the U.S. coal market’s own product wound up in its stocking this Christmas season. Despite hope from the election of Donald Trump and a potential shift toward more coal-friendly energy policies, coal plant owners across the country continued the trend toward shutdowns and reduced operations that have marked the past few years. Coal […]