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The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to review challenges to a 2010 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule setting the acceptable limit for sulfur dioxide (SO2) in the air at 75 parts per billion (ppb) over a 1-hour period. The denial of certiorari leaves intact the EPA’s final revision to the primary National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for SO2 emissions from power plants and other industrial facilities.

The first official day of committee activity in the 113th Congress saw the advancement of two hydropower bills with bipartisan support in the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday proposed four reforms intended to reduce the time and cost to process transmission interconnection requests from generating facilities of 20 MW or smaller. The reforms would boost reliability by increasing energy supply and remove hurdles in the development of new renewable power sources, FERC said.

The Department of Energy (DOE) quietly unveiled a new strategy for the management and disposal of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel on Friday. The strategy calls for a phased, consent-based approach to siting and implementing a nuclear waste management and disposal system, and it endorses building a pilot interim storage facility by 2021.

A report by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergence Response Team (ICS-CERT) reveals that infected USB drives spread common and sophisticated malware in the control systems at two power plants in separate incidents late last year.

An agreement reached between the Virginia Attorney General’s office, Dominion Virginia Power, and Appalachian Power proposes to reduce financial incentives associated with the utilities’ generation of renewables and construction of new fossil fuel–fired power plants.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is the latest key administration official who plans to step down after the beginning of President Barack Obama’s second term on Jan. 21.

More than 107 GW of operating capacity in the U.S. electric power market were bought and sold over 2012, mostly as a result of three large mergers or acquisitions, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) found in an analysis of power plant capacity purchases released on Wednesday.

A federal appeals court last week denied a motion from developers of new coal- and oil-fired power plants to force the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to finalize its reconsidered Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) for new sources by March and help them avoid a regulatory Catch-22 posed by a looming rule to curb greenhouse gas emissions in new plants.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last week completed the final environmental impact statement (EIS) for the DTE Electric Co.’s proposed new Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) at its Enrico Fermi Nuclear Plant.