News

A report released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) last week finds that the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA’s) financial condition could hamper its ability to fund capital improvements—including a 20-year plan to meet power demand with more natural gas generation, three new nuclear reactors, and expanding energy efficiency programs.

Vattenfall last week scrapped a much-awaited €1.5 billion ($2 billion) carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration project it planned to build and begin operating by 2015 in the German federal state of Brandenburg, blaming “insufficient will in German federal politics.”

Rules proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that could require operators of new and existing boilers burning coal, oil, natural gas, and biomass to install a “maximum achievable control technology (MACT)” and limit air pollutants were revised on Friday to offer more flexibility.

Days after the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) warned in a new assessment that new federal air quality rules could stress the nation’s power grid, the Department of Energy (DOE) released its own report examining the potential impact of two standards on electricity reliability. Those rules would prompt the closure of 29 GW of coal-fired capacity, but they should not create resource adequacy issues or unmanageable reliability challenges, the DOE finds.

A Texas District Court today dismissed two appeals challenging air quality permits granted by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) last December for the 600-MW coal-fired Tenaska Trailblazer Energy Center under development near Sweetwater in Nolan County.

CMS Energy Corp.’s Consumers Energy, which has the oldest fleet of coal plants in the nation, with an average age of 50 years, on Friday said it was immediately abandoning plans to build a $2 billion, 830-MW clean coal plant project near Bay City, Mich., and was planning to suspend operations at seven smaller coal-fired units in 2015.

Texas will be short 2,600 MW during the summer 2012 peak, and reserve margins will dip to 12% owing to decisions to mothball some generation units, several delays in planned generation, and a higher load forecast, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said on Thursday.

A report unveiled on Monday by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on the future of the smart grid over the next two decades finds that the U.S. grid can stand up to the challenge of integrating electric vehicles as well as new sources of distributed and intermittent power generation—as long as certain policy changes are made.

Last week, as Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) announced he would propose a federal Clean Energy Standard (CES) bill early next year, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) released an impact analysis that examines how such a policy would affect the nation’s power profile and carbon emissions.

Germany’s government has decided to shutter all 17 of its nuclear plants (23 reactors); eight plants are now closed for business, six more will be closed by 2021, and the final three will close by 2022. What is lacking is an honest discussion of the rising cost Germans will pay for electricity for what The Economist describes as “the greatest change of political course since unification.”