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Houston-based GenOn is the latest of a string of power firms to announce planned power plant closures in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New Jersey. The company formed in December 2010 through the merger of Mirant Corp. and RRI today announced it would deactivate 3,140 MW of generating capacity in PJM’s operational region between June 2012 and May 2015, citing insufficient “forecasted returns on investments necessary to comply with environmental regulations.”

In a landmark ruling that some analysts are calling a “major victory” for the hydropower sector, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court last week overturned a March 2010 decision by the Montana Supreme Court that entitled the state of Montana to collect $89 million in back rent from PPL Montana for that company’s use of state-owned riverbeds for long-standing hydropower plants.

An updated roadmap for the smart grid is now available from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which recently finished reviewing and incorporating roughly 240 comments on the draft version that was released for public comment in October last year.

A severe blaze that broke out on Monday morning at RWE npower’s 750-MW Tilbury power station—a plant recently converted from coal to biomass that has been billed as a pioneer in its use of that technology—raged for two days, until Tuesday, when it was brought under control. All employees at the plant have been accounted for.

A proposed rule issued on Monday by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will not change the greenhouse gas (GHG) permitting thresholds for the Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) and Title V Operating Permit programs. However, it includes revisions to the permitting program that would provide some flexibility in how compliance is achieved with GHG emission caps.

The shield building of FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co.’s (FENOC’s) Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Oak Harbor, Ohio, lacked an exterior weatherproof coating, and this allowed moisture from the blizzard of January 1978 to migrate into the concrete and cause the hairline wall and subsurface cracks discovered during a reactor head replacement outage at the facility last fall, a root cause analysis report indicates.

The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) last week proposed a $428 million upgrade to the Pacific Direct Current Intertie, an 846-mile overhead transmission line that delivers hydropower and wind power between the Northwest and California. The line is one of the world’s longest and highest capacity transmission links.

A study conducted by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and released by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) on Tuesday shows that enough physical and geographical locations exist in the U.S. to site 952 GW of new advanced coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS), dry-cooled and water-cooled concentrating solar power (CSP), and large and small nuclear reactors. The study also suggests that plant siting opportunities exist for compressed air energy storage (CAES) in 38% of the U.S.

Whatever your role in gas-fired power, there’s one constant these days: You probably aren’t bored.

Gas extraction by hydraulic fracturing is not new, but the controversy over it is. While the process carries some notable risks, the potential and promise of fracking argue in favor of responsible development and regulation, not an outright ban.