POWERnews

The Canadian province of Quebec’s newly elected Parti Quebecois government announced on Tuesday that it has decided to shutter the province’s 30-year-old Gentilly-2 nuclear plant.

The Department of Energy (DOE) on Wednesday announced its SunShot Prize, a new competition to make it faster, easier, and cheaper to install rooftop solar energy systems. A total of $10 million in cash awards are available to the first three teams that repeatedly demonstrate the non-hardware costs, or price to plug in, can be as low as $1 per watt for small-scale photovoltaic (PV) systems on American homes and businesses.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on Thursday directed its staff to develop an environmental impact statement (EIS) and a revised waste confidence decision and rule on the temporary storage of spent nuclear fuel (SNF). Last week’s decision was in response to a June 8 federal court ruling, which said the NRC had erred in deciding that SNF from the nation’s power plants could be stored as long as 60 years after a plant’s operating license expires.

Congress has returned from its summer break. As the House prepares to vote on its Upton-Stearns "No More Solyndras Act," lawmakers also expect to focus on a bill that could prohibit finalization of any Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) power plant rules that curb greenhouse gas emissions while carbon capture and storage technology is commercially unavailable. House Democrats, meanwhile, called for hearings to examine the impacts of climate change on the nation’s generators.

Residents of Cuba’s capital Havana and millions of others living in an area stretching 450 miles from the nation’s southeastern province of Camaguey to the westernmost province of Pinar del Rio experienced a massive blackout on Sunday night caused by an "interruption" in a 220-kV transmission line, the government said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) last week said it had reached its $250 million goal to finance smart grid technologies. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack also announced nine rural electric cooperatives and utilities in 10 states would receive loan guarantees to make improvements to generation and transmission facilities and implement smart grid technologies.

Final regulations that seek to tamp down greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from new and end-of-life coal-fired power plants announced by Canada’s federal government on Wednesday, and which will become effective on July 1, 2015, apply a more relaxed performance standard than proposed in the draft rule.

A panel of judges on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) Atomic Safety and Licensing Board last week denied a construction and operating license (COL) for a new reactor proposed at the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Plant in Maryland by Unistar, ruling that applicant Électricité de France (EDF) was completely “foreign-owned.” The decision could have implications for two proposed reactors in Texas, which are partly owned by Toshiba America.

Dominion Virginia Power plans to convert its oldest coal-fired power plant, the 227-MW Bremo Power Station near Bremo Bluff, Va., to natural gas, the company said on Wednesday. The two-unit plant would be the ninth in its fleet to be closed or converted to alternative fuels.

Texas will have enough power to serve consumer needs within the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) during the fall, a new seasonal assessment of resource adequacy (SARA) shows. The assessment, released on Tuesday, comes on the heels of announced plans by the state’s largest generator Luminant to mothball its coal-fired Monticello 1 and 2 units, each rated 582 MW, for at least six months.

Two workers suffered minor injuries on Wednesday when a blast of oxygenated steam escaped in an auxiliary building in the Fessenheim nuclear power station in eastern France and triggered a brief fire alert.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on Friday issued Interim Staff Guidance (ISG) to U.S. nuclear power plants to ensure adequate implementation of three orders it issued in March in response to lessons learned from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear accident.

The Department of Energy (DOE) on Friday awarded more than $5 million to 14 new research projects across 11 states that will examine the potential of methane hydrates as a future energy supply. Interest in methane hydrates, the 3-D ice-lattice structures found both onshore and offshore with natural gas locked inside, has been mounting since the U.S. and Japanese researchers were able to extract a steady flow of natural gas from methane on the North Slope of Alaska earlier this year.

A federal district court on Thursday ruled in favor of more than 800 plaintiffs when it held the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) liable for the December 2008 failure of coal ash containment dikes at its Kingston Fossil plant in Roane County, Tenn., that resulted in the spill of more than a billion gallons of coal ash sludge.

Injection of carbon dioxide began last week at one of the world’s first fully integrated coal-fired carbon capture, transportation, and geologic storage projects. The "Anthropogenic Test" conducted by the Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (SECARB) transports carbon dioxide via a 12-mile pipeline from a 25-MW post-combustion carbon capture facility at Southern Co.’s 2,657-MW Plant Barry in Bucks, Ala., and sequesters it within a saline Paluxy Formation at the nearby Citronelle Oil Field operated by Denbury Resources.

Exelon on Tuesday said it plans to withdraw its Early Site Permit (ESP) application for construction of a new reactor at an 11,500-acre tract of land southeast of Victoria, Texas, saying “low natural gas prices and economic and market conditions . . . have made construction of new merchant nuclear power plants in competitive markets uneconomical now and for the foreseeable future.”

The U.S. Trade Representative on Monday asked the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) to investigate how U.S.-provided renewable energy services affect development of renewable energy projects worldwide. The ITC’s report, expected by June 28, 2013, will focus on the development, generation, and distribution of renewable energy—specifically onshore and offshore wind and solar energy.

Hurricane Isaac soaked the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi after making landfall Tuesday night with sustained winds of up to 80 mph, leaving thousands without power in five states. On Tuesday, Entergy took its Waterford 3 nuclear plant offline as a precautionary measure.

Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) has postponed restart of its troubled 478-MW Fort Calhoun nuclear plant for the third time since it was shut down 16 months ago. Restart of the reactor, located 19 miles north of Omaha, Neb., requires regulatory approval, and that is now tentatively anticipated early next year.

In a landmark ruling that has been seen as a major victory for thermal generators, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Tuesday vacated the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR), finding that it violated federal law. The EPA must now continue implementation of the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) until it can promulgate a replacement, which likely will not happen until at least 2014, industry analysts said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Tuesday issued an alert warning that industrial Ethernet switches and other devices made by network equipment manufacturer RuggedCom and widely used by power companies could be vulnerable to compromise.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Tuesday approved a full build-out of a 1.5-MW gird-connected wave power station that is planned by Ocean Power Technologies’ (OPT’s) Oregon subsidiary Reedsport OPT Wave Park. The license is the first issued for a wave power station in the nation.

Canada’s nuclear regulator on Friday issued a 10-year nuclear power reactor site preparation license to Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG’s) proposed reactor at its Darlington nuclear site in Ontario. The license, described as "an important milestone in Canada’s nuclear history," is the first of its kind in nearly 25 years.

Four rules recently proposed or finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could prompt power companies to retrofit most coal-fired generating units and retire 2% to 12% of coal-fired capacity. The rules would also likely increase power prices in some regions, though they may not cause widespread reliability concerns, a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) suggests.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) on Thursday said it would suspend, for 18 months, enforcement of part of its carbon trading rule as it applies to electricity imported to the state. The measure would help avoid a "negative" impact on energy supplies and reliability for the power-strapped state, the state air regulator said.

Implementation of a new federal nuclear spent fuel–handling program starting in 2020 to remove 6,000 metric tons of uranium (MTU) per year for 10 years and 3,000 MTU per year thereafter could allow for full decommissioning of U.S. sites awaiting fuel removal. It would also enable retirement of all private Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installations by 2030, and achieve approximately a 10% reduction in average wet pool density, a new study from consulting firm The Brattle Group suggests.

As warmer-than-average waters in Connecticut’s Long Island Sound last week prompted Dominion to shut down one unit at its Millstone Nuclear Plant, an ammonia release caused an evacuation of part of Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 1, and Constellation Energy shut down of its Calvert Cliffs Unit 1 reactor after a control rod unexpectedly dropped into the reactor’s core. Then, on Tuesday, Xcel Energy shut down its Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant and Unit 1 of its Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant for repairs.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a determination on Wednesday that finds construction of Cape Wind’s 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound, Mass., would pose no hazard to air navigation. The decision was issued as a congressional House committee probes whether the FAA disregarded safety concerns when it issued a prior approval of the nation’s first offshore wind project.

A new report from the Department of Energy (DOE) highlights sizeable increases in U.S. wind power capacity and recent improvements in the cost and performance of wind power technology, but it says the U.S. continues to trail several countries in wind energy penetration and warns that the industry is facing "serious federal policy uncertainty" looking into 2013 and beyond.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans on Monday ruled 2-1 that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) overstepped its authority in disapproving Texas’s Flexible Permit Program and that reasons the agency offered for rejecting the program were "arbitrary and capricious."