Global Monitor

While 29 states and the District of Columbia currently have Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS)—goals for power producers to provide a certain amount of power from renewable sources by a specific date—a growing number of states are also instituting standalone targets and mandates for energy storage procurement. Sources: Energy Storage Association, North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center, Lawrence Berkeley […]

ABB Receives Contract to Upgrade, Expand Combined Cycle Plant. A consortium including Doosan Heavy Industries and state-owned construction company PT Hutama Karya has awarded a $40 million contract to ABB to

Reforging its core business to return to competitiveness after record losses of €4.83 billion in 2014, French nuclear firm AREVA has split its five operational business units and rebranded them—again. All

Damage to the main and emergency spillways of the Oroville Dam in California, triggered in February 2017 by heavy rain that was part of Northern California’s wettest winter in almost 100 years, has brought

Spanish market and competition regulator CNMC (Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia) in a report published on January 24 said a draft government decree to block power plant closures if they

This month’s THE BIG PICTURE infographic is accompanied by an interactive map. For more, visit: https://www.powermag.com/interactive-map-abandoned-nuclear-power-projects/

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. (NNPC) in December 2017 announced a plan to build three natural gas-fired power plants in the country, thanks to a $2.8 billion pipeline project that would bring natural gas from the southern part of the African nation to its northern region. The plants, sited in Abuja, Kaduna, and Kano, would […]

Increasing uncertainties concerning low forecasted load; construction financing constraints and reversals; state certification hurdles; and challenges to nuclear profitability posed by the growing share of coal plants beset the nuclear industry in the early 1970s. The nuclear suffered a renewed economic meltdown and fierce public pushback in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident […]

The world’s energy transition took an interesting turn at the end of 2017 as global power firm Engie announced it would switch all its gas operations to biogas and renewable hydrogen, the UK slashed its

Russia’s nuclear engineering and construction firm Rosatom in December brought the fourth unit at its Rostov nuclear power plant (NPP) near Volgodonsk in southern Russia to first criticality. Later that

Top governmental bodies in China in December approved plans for a carbon trading system that will first target power plants and then cover most of the nation’s mammoth industrial body.  President Xi Jinping

Voith in December announced it has completed the modernization of the Mucomir hydropower station in Scotland, and the 20-MW facility is again producing electricity for the Scottish grid. Voith was responsible

Polish Energy Company Puts Large Coal-Fired Unit Online. Enea , the Polish state-owned energy company, in December inaugurated what it calls the largest coal-fired power generation unit in Europe. The company

An energy transition is underway across the world. Market upheaval, defining events, and recent policy changes have accelerated a shift away from coal toward renewables. Here is how this transformation played out for some of the world’s major economies over the past decade. Graphs show percent of each fuel source of total generation for that […]

Construction Underway on New Unit at Serbian Coal Plant. It has been almost 30 years since any new power generation capacity was built in Serbia, but that stretch is coming to an end as China Machinery and

Iberdrola’s global strategy to close its remaining coal-fired power plants has met with government opposition in its home country of Spain. Days after Iberdrola, the country’s largest utility, said it

In the next 25 years, the world will turn increasingly to renewables and natural gas to meet energy demand, turning away from coal, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA’s) World Energy

The project to build one of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery storage systems started out as a bet—on Twitter. Last March, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted to Australian billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes

News about the rate at which new renewable power capacity is being added to grids around the world has been overshadowed by a remarkable trend that could revolutionize the renewables sector. Over the past few

In a November report, The Global CCS Institute said carbon capture and storage (CCS) is the only technology able to decarbonize the industrial sector. To reach the Paris Agreement’s target to keep global atmospheric temperature increases to below 2 degrees Celsius, 2,500 CCS facilities will need to be operational by 2040, with 14% of cumulative […]

The world’s first floating offshore wind farm, located roughly 25 kilometers off the coast of Peterhead, Scotland, powered up on October 18, delivering electricity to the Scottish grid. Hywind Scotland was

The Swiss company Climeworks in October said it had begun another round of testing for a direct air capture (DAC) facility at a 300-MW geothermal power plant in Hellisheidi, Iceland. Climeworks, which is

Cheap natural gas, the impact of subsidized intermittent renewables on power prices, and nuclear policies in several countries in the aftermath of the Fukushima accident will continue to hamper strong growth

After months of controversy, Australia’s federal government in October dumped its consideration of a clean energy target (CET) that sought to slash the country’s electricity emissions of carbon dioxide by

The state-owned North-West Power Generation Co. Ltd. (NWPGCL) in Bangladesh in early November announced plans to build a 3,600-MW regasification liquefied natural gas (LNG) combined cycle power plant in the

Construction Set to Begin on First Nuclear Plant in Turkey. Berat Albayrak, Turkey’s Energy and Natural Resources Minister, in mid-October said construction of the country’s first nuclear power plant would

The operating expenses at major U.S. investor-owned electric utilities have shifted over the last decade or so, owing primarily to changing fuel costs.

Africa’s first major coal-fired power unit to implement flue gas desulfurization (FGD) has been completed nearly a year earlier than expected.  South Africa’s state-owned utility Eskom brought Kusile 1

China’s State Nuclear Power Technology Corp. (SNPTC) has completed the installation of its high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) project, the joint venture told the International Atomic Energy Agency

Giant UK Tidal Lagoon Project Secures Grid Connection Deal. Tidal Lagoon Power’s project to build a full-scale 3.2-GW tidal lagoon power plant in the Severn Estuary in Swansea Bay to harness strong tides on