News

Entergy subsidiaries on Thursday announced they had completed three major transmission projects in south Louisiana, including a rebuild of a line in Plaquemines Parish that had been destroyed in Hurricane Katrina and two upgrades to transmission lines that run through the Baton Rouge to New Orleans corridor.

An administrative law judge presiding over hearings on an appeal of an air permit granted by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) to the $1.6 billion ultrasupercritical John W. Turk, Jr. Power Plant proposed for Hempstead County, Ark., on Monday threw out arguments by environmentalists questioning whether carbon dioxide emissions from the plant were properly considered.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) on Friday appealed a January 2009 ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that declared emissions from the public company’s coal plants in eastern Tennessee and Alabama a public nuisance in North Carolina. Experts say that the landmark decision could pave the way for public nuisance suits to regain prominence in climate change–related litigation.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana on Friday ordered Duke Energy to permanently shut down three units—a combined capacity of 265 MW—at the company’s Wabash River Station in Indiana within three months.

The Canadian government is restructuring the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) and may sell a stake of the company to the private sector to leverage the country’s long-term investment in nuclear energy.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act, now bound for debate on the House floor after clearing the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, contains four key changes that will secure the coal industry and thousands of jobs that coal provides, U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) said Friday.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) was the most solar-integrated utility in the U.S. last year, followed by Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, according to new rankings released last week by the Solar Electric Power Association (SEPA).

Owners of unregulated power generation in the Mid-Atlantic continued to enjoy high profits in 2008, despite the economic downturn, according to a study of financial data released on Monday by the American Public Power Association (APPA).

The latest addition to Yokogawa Corp. of America’s temperature controller product line is the UTAdvanced Hybrid Controller, a device that combines Yokogawa’s proportional integral derivative (PID) control with a new, standard embedded ladder sequence control. The new controller supports 84 ladder commands, 24 DIO points, four analog inputs, three analog outputs and allows up to […]

AMETEK Solidstate Controls Inc. (SCI) introduced SAGE, a remote uninterruptible power supply (UPS) monitoring system that connects seamlessly with AMETEK SCI’s UPS line of products (both Ferro and PWM). With SAGE, all of the alarms and notifications from a UPS can be accessed remotely. SAGE also works in combination with SCI’s CellRx battery monitoring system, […]

Garlock Sealing Technologies developed a new ultra-low-emission, high-temperature valve stem spool packing designed to simplify leak detection and repair of volatile organic compound and hazardous air pollutant emissions. Delivering emissions performance of <20 parts per million average leakage, the Garlock Style 212-ULE comes in an easy-to-use recyclable dispenser with color-coded instructions. The number of typical […]

Exaktime’s ClockPoint Kiosk is new software that lets office staff clock in using a single PC running Windows XP or Vista in the same way as field workers would clock in using the JobClock System, Exatime’s time and attendance system designed for use in the field. The system includes portable devices (JobClock and PocketClock/GPS) that […]

Newport Corp. introduced the 1928-C Single-Channel Benchtop Optical Meter, a compact and versatile power meter that provides an affordable alternative to customers looking for a single-channel benchtop energy/power measurement tool. The new model interfaces with all of Newport’s photodiode detectors, thermopiles, and pyroelectric detectors. It has the capability of measuring from 11 pW up to […]

The new Duo-Spring secondary tensioner developed by ASGCO Complete Conveyor Solutions utilizes a patent-pending mounting plate that allows the cleaning blade to be spring tensioned in either a pull-up or push-up position. This specially designed configurability features two different mounting options that leave extra clearance above or below the bracket where necessary. The Duo-Spring secondary […]

South Korea is gearing up to install the world’s longest distribution voltage superconductor cable system near Seoul by mid-2010. This April, the nation’s largest power cable manufacturer, LS Cable, ordered about 50 miles of 344 superconductors — American Superconductor Corp.’s (AMSC) second-generation high-temperature superconductor (HTS) wire. It plans to strand that wire into a 22.9-kV […]

A jury in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana last week ruled in favor of Duke Energy and against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on four of six projects involved in a decade-long pollution controls lawsuit affecting the company’s Midwest power plants. The jury ruled against the company on two Indiana projects.

A public-private partnership that includes the Energy Department, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and Southern Co. is planning the largest start-to-end coal-fired demonstration of MHI’s amine solvent carbon capture technology at an existing Alabama coal-fired unit by 2011.

Carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector decreased by about 2.1% as power generation declined by 1% last year, according to preliminary estimates released last week by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The decrease reflected, among other factors, falling emissions from fossil fuel generation and an increase in wind-powered generation, the agency said.

Despite financial turmoil, the global carbon market doubled in size and grew to an estimated value of $126 billion, according to the latest State and Trends of the Carbon Market Report 2009, released today by the World Bank at Carbon Expo in Barcelona.

After a week of long and heated arguments, the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Friday passed by a vote of 33 to 25 the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, a massive 946-page bill that would set up a cap-and-trade program and a federal renewable energy standard.
H.R. 2454 now heads to the House Ways and Means Committee, which will review the tax and trade implications of the bill. That committee could make more revisions to the bill.

U.S. power sales have plunged in the past six months on the back of an unprecedented demand decline that was caused by sharp contractions in the economy, and recovery is not anticipated until the 2010 to 2015 period, an analysis from Edinburgh-based Wood Mackenzie shows.

Russia’s federal atomic energy agency, Rosatom, reportedly said Tuesday that it had reached a landmark deal to supply enriched uranium fuel rods to nuclear power plants in the U.S.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee began markup of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (H.R. 2454) on Monday and Tuesday this week, spending hours wrangling over the first of several hundred amendments proposed for the 946-page bill.

A federal court has determined that Salt Lake City–based EnergySolutions can import 1.600 tons of low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) from Italy to its facility in Clive, Utah, ruling that its efforts fall outside the regulatory jurisdiction of the Northwest Compact, a coalition that includes Utah and seven other states.

French Prime Minister François Fillon  and AREVA CEO Anne Lauvergeon on Monday inaugurated the first centrifuge cascade of the €3 billion Georges Besse II uranium enrichment plant, where production is set to commence this year.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu on Friday announced at the National Coal Council that $2.4 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be used to expand and accelerate the commercial deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

UniStar Nuclear Energy last week confirmed that its Calvert Cliffs Unit 3 nuclear energy facility was among four projects chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to enter the final phase of due diligence for a portion of $18.5 billion in federal loan guarantees for advanced nuclear projects. The selection positions UniStar to move forward with detailed negotiations leading to a conditional commitment under the program.

American Electric Power (AEP) and Allegheny Energy on Tuesday said they had jointly filed an application seeking authorization to build a proposed electric transmission line in West Virginia.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has reportedly dropped Luminant’s Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant’s expansion planned in Texas from its list of new nuclear projects being considered for the first round of federal loan guarantee. Four projects now remain on the DOE shortlist. New reactors at Southern Co.’s Vogtle plant in Georgia, Scana Corp.’s Summer […]

The Kansas Senate last week approved by a 37–2 vote an energy bill that will allow Sunflower Electric Power Corp. to build a long-delayed coal-fired power plant near Holcombe. The bill’s approval comes days after Kansas’ new governor, Mark Parkinson, and Sunflower Electric Power Corp. reached a compromise that would scale down the company’s plans […]