POWERnews

Events over the past year—turmoil in the oil-rich Middle East and the Russian-Ukraine gas crisis—along with uncertainty for nuclear power and pervading energy poverty worldwide show that the energy system is “under stress,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) says in its freshly released World Energy Outlook 2014 (WEO-2014). Despite technology and efficiency improvements, without actions […]

Reaching an unexpected climate breakthrough, the U.S. and China in a joint statement on Wednesday each announced new targets to slash carbon dioxide emissions by 2030.  President Barack Obama set a new target to cut U.S. carbon emissions between 26% and 28% below 2005 levels by 2025. Chinese leader Xi Jinping, meanwhile, said his country […]

Kyushu Electric Power Co.’s twin Sendai nuclear units in Japan’s Kagoshima Prefecture on Nov. 7 got the government’s green light to restart. Once back online, likely in 2015, the units will be the first to restart of Japan’s 48 reactors that were shuttered for safety checks following the March 2011 Fukushima accident. Kagoshima Prefecture Governor Yuichiro […]

After a decade of negotiations, Russia and China have now closed two major gas supply agreements, with a memorandum of understanding for a second route west of the first being signed on Nov. 9. According to Russian media, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed on a deal to supply 30 billion […]

Texas utility Oncor announced this week that it will seek regulatory approval to spend up to $5.2 billion on 5 GW of energy storage resources to firm up its grid and improve reliability. Oncor owns the state’s largest electrical grid, and it hopes to deploy distributed storage batteries across its entire system beginning in 2018. […]

A couple of recently released reports offer some hope for the future of nuclear power plants operating on the fringe of profitability. Moody’s Investors Service suggests that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Clean Power Plan “could increase the value of nuclear power as a non-carbon emitting generation source.” In its report, “Environmental Mandates and […]

Southern California Edison (SCE) signed contracts for more than 260 MW of energy storage resources on Nov. 5, among them what will be the largest grid-connected battery system in the world, a 100-MW facility supplied by AES Energy Storage. Under its mandate from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), SCE was required to sign contracts […]

On Nov. 5, The Babcock & Wilcox Co. (B&W) announced that its board of directors has unanimously approved a plan for the tax-free spin-off of the company’s power generation business to B&W’s shareholders, in the process forming two independently traded companies. In its third-quarter earnings call the following day, company executives emphasized that the two […]

Four industry-led projects will each receive about $16 million in federal funding to help them to significantly reduce the cost of producing hydrogen-rich syngas derived from fossil fuels and advance the gasification process for power generation and syngas production, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced on Nov. 6. “Gasification plants have the potential for greater […]

A collapse of Bangladesh’s national power grid over the weekend turned out the lights for about 60% of the nation of 160 million people for more than 10 hours.  The interruption reportedly occurred at about 11:30 a.m. on Nov. 1 at a substation in Kushtia district, western Bangladesh, which knocked out a 400-kV transmission line […]