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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on Tuesday conditionally offered a $90.6 million loan guarantee to support the construction of Cogentrix of Alamosa’s Alamosa Solar Generating Project. The 30-MW (net capacity) High Concentration Solar Photovoltaic (HCPV) generation project in south-central Colorado near the city of Alamosa will source over 80% of its components from the U.S, the DOE said.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) on Tuesday said it would supply two 350-MW steam turbines for installation at two large-scale coal-fired thermal plants in Morocco planned by Jorf Lasfar Energy Co., a power plant company owned by Abu Dhabi National Energy Co. (TAQA).

The 900-MW Hatfield power project, one of the UK’s first carbon capture and storage (CCS) coal-fired projects, was revived on Monday with the purchase of Powerfuel Power Ltd. by 2Co Energy, a new company backed by private equity fund firm TPG Capital. The project has now been renamed Don Valley Power Project, and it is set to begin operations between 2015 and 2016, capturing and storing up to 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year under the seabed of the North Sea.

Dominion plans to shutter two of the four units at Salem Harbor Power Station by the end of this year, and it will close the entire plant in Salem, Mass., by June 2014 because “pending environmental regulations and market conditions are making the power station uneconomical to operate,” the company announced today. The news comes on the heels of the announced closure of Dominion’s State Line Power Plant in Hammond, Ind.

Two newly built reactors reached important milestones in the past week. Reports say the second unit of the Ling Ao phase II nuclear plant in China’s Guangdong Province was connected to the grid on May 3, while Russian state-owned Atomstroyexport said Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant achieved criticality on May 8 and is now functioning at the minimum controlled power level.

On Sunday, Mexico’s labor secretary, Javier Lozano, announced that the bodies of all 14 miners had been retrieved from a coal mine in northern Mexico that collapsed last Tuesday after a methane explosion.

Japanese utility Chubu Electric Power Co. on Monday agreed to shut down all units at its Hamaoka nuclear power plant in Shizuoka Prefecture as soon as possible on safety concerns. The action includes idling Unit 4 and Unit 5, an advanced boiling water reactor that started commercial operation in 2005. The company, which is in the process of mothballing Units 1 and 2, said it would also postpone restarting Unit 3, which has been shut down for maintenance since November 2010.

 Marine energy technology firm Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) on Monday said it had begun ocean trials of the first of its new generation utility-scale PowerBuoy device, the PB150. The ocean trials are being conducted at a site approximately 33 nautical miles from Invergordon, off ScotlandÂ’s northeast coast, and are expected to last up to three months.

Dominion will at the end of next year close the 515-MW State Line Power Station in Hammond, Ind. The coal-fired plant has two units: The first fired up in 1955 and the second, in 1962.

Workers are scrambling to contain highly radioactive water and prevent another explosion at the quake-devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Meanwhile, the situation—which still remains “very serious,” according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—has improved only incrementally, the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) told lawmakers.