POWERnews

Cyber attacks on the utility industry are no longer theoretical. According to multiple sources, smart grid technology vendor Telvent told U.S., Canadian, and Spanish customers on Sept. 10 that hackers had broken through its firewall and accessed “project files” related to its OASyS SCADA system. On Wednesday, reports surfaced that, based on the perpetrators’ “digital fingerprints,” the attack appears to be the work of a well-known Chinese hacker group.

Low natural gas prices and still-soft electricity demand are forcing low-load and cycling operations at traditionally baseloaded coal units across the country. The resulting challenges were top of mind at the Electric Utility Cost Group’s (EUCG’s) fall meeting in Denver last week. One member of the EUCG’s fossil generation committee from an Ohio Valley utility said that cycling and low-load operations pose challenges for one of his company’s 1,300-MW coal-fired plants that “two years ago we wouldn’t have considered possible.”

Florida Power & Light (FPL) on Monday got the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) approval to increase power¬¬¬ output of St. Lucie Unit 2 by 17%, from 853 MWe to 1,002 MWe. The regulator had in July approved a similar uprate for St. Lucie Unit 1, and its decision on Monday means FPL can fully proceed with its $3 billion plan to boost nuclear output and save on future fossil fuel costs.

An inspection has shown that loss of offsite power at the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant near Burlington, Kan., in January had substantial safety significance and will result in additional inspections and regulatory oversight, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said on Friday.

PPL Montana plans to mothball its 154-MW coal-fired J.E. Corette power plant in Billings, Mont., starting in April 2015. The company cited "effects of pending Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] regulations combined with economic factors," as reasons for its decision.

About 1,792 MW of existing generation in the New York bulk power system is expected to retire or be mothballed over the next decade, and if demand heightens as has been forecast by 2020, the state’s grid could see a 1,000-MW generation gap, the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) warned in its recently released 2012 Reliability Needs Assessment (RNA).

Progress Energy last week shuttered its 382-MW coal-fired H.F. Lee power plant near Goldsboro, N.C. The 1951-built station is the second to be retired under the Duke Energy subsidiary’s fleet modernization program.

RWE npower, the German energy company’s UK arm, on Tuesday said it would shutter its coal-fired 2,000-MW Didcot A Power Station in Oxfordshire and the 1,000-MW oil-fired Fawley Power Station in Hampshire at the end of March 2013 under the European Union’s (EU’s) Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD).

Japan’s Cabinet on Wednesday refrained from endorsing a much-awaited, controversial recommendation made just days before by an advisory panel urging Japan to seek to close all its viable nuclear reactors by 2040 and increase its reliance on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and fossil fuels.

Spent nuclear fuel stored onsite at commercial nuclear reactors in the U.S. will increase by about 2,000 metric tons per year and balloon to more than 140,000 metric tons by 2055, before it can be moved offsite when storage or disposal facilities are expected to have been developed, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a recently released report.

More than 300 state and national public interest groups on Friday asked U.S. senators to oppose a bill introduced in August by Sens. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and Max Baucus (D- Mont.) that they say will fail to protect public health and the environment because it encourages "unsafe dumping of toxic coal ash."

One of the best ways California would be able to endure another summer without power from Southern California Edison’s (SCE’s) San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station would be to convert the Huntington Beach Units 3 and 4 into synchronous condensers, allowing them to act somewhat like spinning flywheels to adjust grid conditions, experts from the California Independent System Operator Corp. (CAISO) told its Board of Governors at a meeting last week.

San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) has agreed to pay $6.4 million to the U.S. Forest Service to settle claims related to one of the largest wildfires in California history. The utility has already paid more than $1 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits after state investigations concluded that the company’s high-voltage power lines produced electrical arcing and ignited the 2007 Witch Creek Fire that ravaged 198,000 acres near Santa Ysabel in San Diego County, Calif.

The title of world’s largest operating solar photovoltaic (PV) power plant goes to Arizona. On Monday, First Solar Inc. announced that the Agua Caliente solar project has achieved a peak generating capacity of 250 MW connected to the electrical grid. The project, under construction in Yuma County, will have a total capacity of 290 MW when completed.

In testimony before a congressional subcommittee, Joseph McClelland, director of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Office of Electric Reliability, enumerated the ways in which the U.S. regulatory system is ill-equipped to deal with time-sensitive threats to physical and cyber assets of its power system.

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.