POWERnews

Holtec International said the Palisades Power Plant, which was closed in 2022 and set for decommissioning, is now the first U.S. nuclear power plant to officially return to operations status. Holtec, which bought the Michigan-based plant to decommission it but instead decided the facility could be restarted, on August 25 said Palisades is now authorized […]

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, more than 70% of the nation’s grid transmission lines and transformers are more than 25 years old, straining under the pressures of rising electrification and renewable integration. As power producers, utilities, and grid operators push toward decarbonization targets, the need for more intelligent, responsive, and resilient grid infrastructure […]

For decades, fuel cell innovation has been guided by two main benchmarks: cost per kilowatt and stack durability. These remain important, especially in applications driven almost entirely by project economics. However, in many of the sectors where fuel cells are poised to make the biggest impact—including aviation, long-haul mobility, and distributed energy—traditional metrics no longer […]

Tigo Energy, a provider of intelligent solar and energy software solutions, has announced a manufacturing and marketing partnership with EG4 Electronics, an American provider of innovative solar solutions. The agreement announced August 25 will see EG4 produce Tigo optimized inverters and Module Level Power Electronics (MLPE) together with EG4 solar inverters in the U.S. Solar […]

An energy infrastructure company said it’s moving forward with the GW Ranch project, an off-grid complex in Texas that will combine natural gas-fired generation and battery energy storage to provide nearly 7 GW of power in Pecos County. The campus, sited on more than 8,000 acres, is designed “to support hyperscale data centers and the […]

A spokesperson for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) confirmed that about 600 of the utility’s employees have taken buyouts. Some workers left the company starting in May, while others will exit by the end of September. The TVA on August 21 said the move is part of a plan to reduce costs as the federally owned utility tries to cut nearly $1 billion in spending by 2026.

Swedish utility Vattenfall has narrowed its small modular reactor (SMR) supplier selection to two finalists—GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s (GVH’s) BWRX-300 and the Rolls-Royce SMR—for potential construction of new nuclear capacity adjacent to its Ringhals plant site on Sweden’s Värö Peninsula. The announcement represents a critical step in what could become Sweden’s first new nuclear build project in more than 40 years. While the utility ultimately intends […]

Despite nuclear power’s unmatched ability to produce reliable, carbon-free energy at scale, it is often dismissed by clean energy advocates in favor of renewable resources like wind and solar. Cost arguments and public misconceptions around safety and radioactive waste have kept it out of many mainstream climate strategies. But as Tim Gregory argues in his […]

The dual challenges of affordability and growing load demand are putting enormous stress on utilities, communities and households. Demand response, a key part of the solution, is falling short, but innovative payment plans can help fill the gap. Residential demand response (DR) is like the aerobic exercise of the electric utility industry. We all know […]

In the past decade, we have seen “once in a century storms” almost every year, flash floods wiping out entire towns, and extreme heat that melts shoes on pavement. Our climate is becoming more extreme, and we need to be proactive in preparing our infrastructure for more to come. The annual average for U.S. billion-dollar […]