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The Tennessee Valley Authority this week said it will pay a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposed $140,000 fine for security violations at its Browns Ferry nuclear station near Athens, Ala. According to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, Steve Bono, Browns Ferry site director, said that the giant regional power agency “accepts full responsibility” for the […]

An agreement between Canada’s federal government and Saskatchewan will allow the province to continue operating its coal-fired power plants beyond 2030 as long as it achieves equivalent emission-reduction outcomes. The Office of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change and the Office of the Minister of Environment for Saskatchewan reached a deal to finalize an […]

[Note: This article first appeared online on November 1.] The discovery of widespread carbon segregation problems in critical nuclear plant components has crippled the French power industry—20 of the country’s 58 reactors are currently offline and under heavy scrutiny. France’s nuclear safety chairman said more anomalies “will likely be found,” as the extent of the contagion […]

Owner/operator: Pattern Energy Just as Seattle’s Amazon.com jumpstarted the online shopping trend, it’s now part of another trend that has major corporations owning or contracting for sizable grid-connected renewable power facilities. A new wind farm in rural Indiana is part of that story. Cloud computing is big business, and it’s growing as fast as cumulous […]

Owner/operator: Ethiopian Electric Power Corp. Building the 1,870-MW Gibe III hydroelectric project required unprecedented solutions that took into account the remoteness of the site, the narrow gorge where the dam is located, the height of the dam, and challenges in sourcing reliable materials. Split almost diagonally by the East African Rift System, Ethiopia is a […]

Owner/operator: Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County/Babcock & Wilcox Co. Although waste-to-energy (WTE) technology is well proven, the relatively low cost of landfilling garbage in the U.S. has foiled new power plant construction for many years. However, a facility in Florida—the first greenfield WTE project the U.S. has seen in 20 years—shows it’s still […]

The ocean power sector is still in its early stages of development, shackled by high development and operational costs. Trends emerging over the past two years hint at which technologies could dominate the sector’s future. Despite decades of research and development that have yielded several innovative ways of using oceans to fuel power generation, the […]

Ontario—Canada’s most populous province and its major economic engine—has an electric power supply system so driven by provincial politics that it has pushed the province’s utility generating arm, Ontario Power Generation, into what appear to be incoherent resource policies. Late last September, in a stunning announcement, the Canadian province of Ontario’s Energy Ministry said it […]

God forbid that you have a job that requires you to read the orders issued by public utility commissions (PUCs). As a regulator, I not only have to read them—I have to write them. And even I marvel at the arcane, trial-like proceedings of PUCs and the orders that emerge from them, which are the […]