POWERnews

Italy’s Enel and Electricité de France (EDF) on Monday sealed a €16 billion deal to jointly develop feasibility studies for the construction of at least four advanced third-generation EPR units in Italy—a country that recently reversed a 21-year-old ban on nuclear power.

The New York Power Authority (NYPA) is reportedly negotiating an energy project with Hydro Quebec and other Canadian entities that could allow the state-owned power organization to import up to 2,000 MW of power from multiple sources, including hydropower, from Canada.

Chinese officials claim that the country is 18 months ahead of schedule in its goal to close 50 million kilowatts of coal-fired generating capacity by the end of 2010. They say the country has so far shut down small coal-fired plants with a total generating capacity of 54.07 GW from 2006 to the end of June this year—about 7% of the nation’s current generating capacity.

To meet future demand as well as carbon constraints, the U.S. power industry should by 2030 build 45 new nuclear reactors, increase renewable generation four-fold, decrease electricity consumption 8% through improved end-use efficiency, and deploy 100 million plug-in electric vehicles, according to an updated “Prism and Merge” analyses from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

A report released on Tuesday by the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA’s) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) lambasts the publically owned company’s management practices. It says that the breach of a 50-year-old coal ash storage pond and subsequent ash spill at its Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tenn., last December could have been prevented if TVA had heeded 20 years of warnings and taken recommended corrective actions.

Doosan Babcock Energy on Friday switched on what it is calling the “world’s largest” oxyfuel combustion carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility in Renfrew, Scotland. The facility will demonstrate that company’s OxyCoal Clean Combustion system for the first time on a full-size 40-MW burner.

The Department of Energy (DOE) on Tuesday said it had encouraged USEC to withdraw its application for $2 billion in loan guarantee funding for the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio. The decision has forced the nation’s only domestic uranium enrichment firm to begin demobilizing the project.

U.S. Senators Bob Casey (D-Penn.) and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) last week introduced a bill to encourage the commercial deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology by setting up a program for managing financial risk or liability of the long-term storage of the greenhouse gas.

Canada’s only private nuclear generating company, Bruce Power, plans to withdraw its application to build two new nuclear power plants in Ontario, opting instead to refurbish existing reactors. The decisions reflect the “realities of the market” and are unique to Ontario, the company said last week.

New wind energy installations in the U.S. plunged to just 1,210 MW in the second quarter of 2009—falling to less than half of the 2,790 MW of new installations reported for the first quarter of this year—according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA).

The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works last week continued a series of hearings that assesses how proposed energy and climate change legislation could impact industry and economy. Last week’s hearing was titled, “Ensuring and Enhancing U.S. Competitiveness while Moving toward a Clean Energy Economy.”

India on Monday pledged to designate two nuclear energy park sites  for development by U.S. companies—likely Westinghouse Electric Co. and GE-Hitachi—as part of its civilian nuclear energy cooperation agreement with the U.S. Before the deals—worth an estimated $10 billion—to develop nuclear power plants are signed, however, the U.S. will need to overcome several hurdles.

The UK government has approved MGT Power’s proposed £500 million Tees Renewable Energy Plant, paving the way for construction to begin. When completed in late 2012, the 295-MW baseload plant in Teesport, near Middlesbrough, will be one of the largest biomass plants in the world.

TransAlta Corp. on Monday launched a hostile takeover bid of C$653.7 million (C$1.5 billion in enterprise value) for renewables giant Canadian Hydro Developers, offering shareholders C$4.55 per share in cash. The energy giant said that the move followed a seven-month failed effort to negotiate an acquisition transaction with Canadian Hydro.

Southern Co. has partnered with the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (SECARB) to inject carbon dioxide captured from Alabama Power’s Plant Barry into a 9,000-feet-deep saline reservoir north of Mobile, Ala.

Energy storage in the U.S. received another boost this week as two flywheel energy storage companies reported milestones, and KEMA briefed the U.S. Congress on policy issues that could impact the development and adoption of electricity storage technologies and applications.

Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) last week signed an agreement with three Chinese companies to develop and demonstrate the use of thorium fuel and to study the commercial and technical feasibility of its full-scale application in CANDU reactors like the twin CANDU 6 that are being built in Qinshan III, southwest of Shanghai.

More consumers would buy electric vehicles if the battery could be leased on a pay-per-mile service contract, argues a new study from the University of California at Berkeley.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is preparing to conduct what it says is the world’s first large-scale project to design, build, and test a warm gas cleanup system to remove multiple contaminants from coal-derived syngas. The federal agency has teamed with Research Triangle Institute (RTI) International, a scientific research firm, to demonstrate the 50-MW system at Tampa Electric Co.’s 250-MW integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) power plant.

A federal appeals court last week struck down parts of a 2005 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule governing power plant and factory pollution in areas where levels exceeded the federal 8-hour ozone standard. Also last week, an agency official told a Senate panel that the EPA was quickly moving forward to replace the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) and Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR).

The $3.5 billion Taylorville Energy Center (TEC), a hybrid integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) power plant proposed for Illinois by Tenaska and MDL Holding Co., has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy for final term-sheet negotiations under its loan guarantee program.

UK business group CBI on Monday released a report warning that the country’s current policy of incentivizing investments in wind power would result in too little investment in other forms of low-carbon energy, such as nuclear and clean coal. The approach will make energy security harder to achieve, and it could jeopardize the UK’s ability to meet climate change targets, the group said.

Fifteen environmental groups and a western Colorado county last week filed suit against the federal Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and Energy, saying that the government’s “sprawling, hopscotch network” of 6,000 miles and 3.2 million acres of federal land designated as electricity transmission corridors promote coal- and gas-fired power generation, not renewable generation from sources like solar and wind.

The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works kicked off efforts to pass climate change and energy legislation in a general hearing on Tuesday, presenting a variety of perspectives on a potential federal cap-and-trade program.

The Georgia Court of Appeals on Tuesday reversed a lower court ruling that had rejected an air pollution permit for the planned $2 billion Longleaf Energy Station in southwest Georgia because it did not set limits on carbon dioxide emissions.

The Department of Energy (DOE) last week issued $59 million in conditional loan guarantees to Beacon Power Corp. and Nordic Windpower, while USEC said on Monday it expects to receive a loan guarantee for its American Centrifuge Plant by early August.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has officially scrapped the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) program, a Bush administration initiative to promote nuclear technologies while reducing the impacts associated with nuclear fuel disposal and proliferation risks.

T. Boone Pickens has postponed plans for a multibillion-dollar project to build the world’s biggest wind farm in Texas, citing funding and transmission issues.

Duke Energy has filed testimony with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission for a proposed project that would store a portion of carbon dioxide emissions from its Edwardsport coal gasification power plant underground in southwest Indiana.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed by a narrow vote of 219–212 a mammoth climate change and energy bill on Friday that, among other things, seeks to establish a carbon emissions reduction goal, a cap-and-trade program, and a federal renewable energy standard. The bill now heads to the Senate.