News

Canada’s only private nuclear generating company, Bruce Power, plans to withdraw its application to build two new nuclear power plants in Ontario, opting instead to refurbish existing reactors. The decisions reflect the “realities of the market” and are unique to Ontario, the company said last week.

New wind energy installations in the U.S. plunged to just 1,210 MW in the second quarter of 2009—falling to less than half of the 2,790 MW of new installations reported for the first quarter of this year—according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA).

India on Monday pledged to designate two nuclear energy park sites  for development by U.S. companies—likely Westinghouse Electric Co. and GE-Hitachi—as part of its civilian nuclear energy cooperation agreement with the U.S. Before the deals—worth an estimated $10 billion—to develop nuclear power plants are signed, however, the U.S. will need to overcome several hurdles.

The UK government has approved MGT Power’s proposed £500 million Tees Renewable Energy Plant, paving the way for construction to begin. When completed in late 2012, the 295-MW baseload plant in Teesport, near Middlesbrough, will be one of the largest biomass plants in the world.

TransAlta Corp. on Monday launched a hostile takeover bid of C$653.7 million (C$1.5 billion in enterprise value) for renewables giant Canadian Hydro Developers, offering shareholders C$4.55 per share in cash. The energy giant said that the move followed a seven-month failed effort to negotiate an acquisition transaction with Canadian Hydro.

Southern Co. has partnered with the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (SECARB) to inject carbon dioxide captured from Alabama Power’s Plant Barry into a 9,000-feet-deep saline reservoir north of Mobile, Ala.

Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) last week signed an agreement with three Chinese companies to develop and demonstrate the use of thorium fuel and to study the commercial and technical feasibility of its full-scale application in CANDU reactors like the twin CANDU 6 that are being built in Qinshan III, southwest of Shanghai.

More consumers would buy electric vehicles if the battery could be leased on a pay-per-mile service contract, argues a new study from the University of California at Berkeley.

Fifteen environmental groups and a western Colorado county last week filed suit against the federal Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and Energy, saying that the government’s “sprawling, hopscotch network” of 6,000 miles and 3.2 million acres of federal land designated as electricity transmission corridors promote coal- and gas-fired power generation, not renewable generation from sources like solar and wind.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is preparing to conduct what it says is the world’s first large-scale project to design, build, and test a warm gas cleanup system to remove multiple contaminants from coal-derived syngas. The federal agency has teamed with Research Triangle Institute (RTI) International, a scientific research firm, to demonstrate the 50-MW system at Tampa Electric Co.’s 250-MW integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) power plant.