POWERnews

A large swath of the central U.S. set a North American wind penetration record of 52.1% early in the morning on February 12, the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) reported. The regional transmission organization (RTO), whose footprint spans 550,000 square miles from the Canadian border in Montana and North Dakota to parts of New Mexico, Texas, […]

A group of power companies have filed a federal lawsuit against the State of Illinois, challenging a recently enacted law that creates subsidies for Exelon’s uneconomic nuclear power plants. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed on February 14 in the Northern District of Illinois are the Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA), Dynegy, Eastern Generation, NRG […]

Remote and online monitoring of plant performance parameters is an important step toward a fully connected plant, but alone it’s not enough to exploit the real value in the Industrial Internet of Things, speakers at POWER’s inaugural Connected Plant Conference on February 15 in Dallas said. Randy Bickford, president and CTO of software firm Expert […]

An explosion at EDF Energy’s Flamanville nuclear power station in France has been controlled, the utility said. The blast, which rocked Unit 1 at the nuclear plant on France’s northern coast at around 9:45 a.m. local time on February 9, stemmed from a fire originating from a fan located under the generator, EDF Energy said […]

Former President Barack Obama’s regulation-heavy Climate Action Plan was inefficient and should be replaced with a carbon tax, a group of senior Republican statesmen told White House officials during a February 8 meeting. The new pitch is laid out in a paper by the Climate Leadership Council — whose membership includes former GOP Treasury Secretaries […]

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) in North America is about to have its year, Julio Friedmann, senior adviser for energy innovation at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said during the February 8 Global CCS Institute’s annual Americas Forum. “We are just now like fully deployed and hopefully that will finally quash […]

President Donald Trump’s drive to roll back federal regulations, especially from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), will not be simple or smooth, a veteran Washington, D.C., attorney said at a utility conference on February 8. Speaking at the Energy, Utility, and Environment Conference (EUEC) in San Diego, Calif., Thomas Lorenzen, a partner with D.C.–based law […]

Denmark’s DONG Energy is the latest in a string of power companies that are shunning the use of coal in future generation fleets. The company said on February 8 it will stop burning coal completely by 2023 in its power stations, replacing it with sustainable biomass. The measure is part of a company-wide transformation towards […]

As House Republicans issued a bill to dismantle the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) this week, a House committee held a hearing on how to make the agency “great again,” and former EPA employees expressed serious concerns about the looming nomination of Scott Pruitt to head the agency. The bill (H.R. 861), which seeks to […]

Pairing energy storage with rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) systems has been widely touted as the path for greater deployment of renewable energy, but a new study from researchers at the University of Texas suggests doing so may actually increase overall energy consumption and emissions. The study, “The Impacts of Storing Solar Energy in the Home […]