POWERnews

On Oct. 1, GenOn shuttered its 482-MW coal-fired Potomac River Generating Station as Progress Energy Carolinas retired three coal-fired units—two at the 316-MW Cape Fear plant near Moncure, N.C., and the 177-MW H.B. Robinson Unit 1 near Hartsville, S.C. Utah’s Rocky Mountain Power, a unit of PacifiCorp, meanwhile reportedly warned employees and public officials that it may close its 190-MW coal-fired Carbon Power Plant in northeastern Utah over the next few years because it has no room to install air emissions controls to make it compliant with federal rules by 2015.

The National Park Service on Monday approved a $1.2 billion 500-kV transmission line that will run from the Berwick area in Pennsylvania to Roseland, N.J., a project that developers Public Service Electric and Gas Co. (PSE&G) and PPL Electric Utilities say will boost electric service reliability and provide a significant economic stimulus to the region.

A bill introduced by U.S. Reps. John Tierney and Ed Markey on Wednesday could prevent the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) from granting operating license renewals to reactor owners that apply more than 10 years before a current facility license expires.

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.

Exelon’s 852-MW Three Mile Island Generating Station near Harrisburg, Pa., on Thursday automatically tripped owing to a flux to flow imbalance of the "C" reactor coolant pump, a filing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) shows.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) last week approved a deal involving the state’s major utilities and renewable energy advocates that is  aimed at streamlining the process for connecting distributed generation (DG) resources to the grid. The CPUC’s action will make it easier for small amounts of distributed resources—such as rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) systems—to connect to the grid. The agreement also revises upward the amount of DG that can be connected to a specific power line segment without the need for supplemental studies.

A license issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on Tuesday greenlights operation of a proposed plant that will use laser technology to enrich uranium for fuel in commercial nuclear power reactors. If built as proposed on a 1,600-acre site at General Electric–Hitachi Global Laser Enrichment’s (GLE’s) global headquarters in Wilmington, N.C., where GLE currently operates a fuel fabrication plant, the facility would be one of two new enrichment plants expected to be operational by 2020, even though several others have received NRC approval and federal government funding.

In its last legislative act before the November election, the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday passed by a vote of 233 to 175 the controversial "Stop the War on Coal Act," a legislative package of measures that seeks to bar the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from promulgating carbon emission rules, calls for an analysis of the cumulative economic impacts of certain environmental rules, and would create a state-based program to regulate coal ash.

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.