POWERnews

A year after the beleaguered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) was shut down owing to issues identified in the steam generator tubes of the plant’s two units, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced tentative milestones for its independent review. The federal agency now projects that a possible decision regarding restart of Unit 2 could come in late April.

Average spot natural gas prices in New England have surged to $3 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) higher than natural gas prices at the Henry Hub since November, driven up by supply constraints from natural gas pipelines that haven’t kept up with demand, high international prices, and declining production in eastern Canada, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) says in a report released last week.

A federal court on Tuesday ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) exceeded its authority when it established a screening tool that could allow some new power plants to be exempted from certain requirements under the EPA’s October 2010-finalized rule aimed at curbing emissions of particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter.

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) on Friday narrowly approved a determination that U.S. industry is materially injured or threatened with material injury by imports of unfairly subsidized utility-scale wind towers from China and Vietnam. The ITC’s determination gives the Department of Commerce the green light to issue antidumping and countervailing duty orders on imports of those products from the two countries.

Once a world leader in innovation and manufacturing of clean energy technologies, the U.S. now faces significant competitive challenges from Europe and Asia, and it lags behind other nations on measures that include renewables deployment, manufacturing, and innovation, a new report suggests.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to review challenges to a 2010 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule setting the acceptable limit for sulfur dioxide (SO2) in the air at 75 parts per billion (ppb) over a 1-hour period. The denial of certiorari leaves intact the EPA’s final revision to the primary National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for SO2 emissions from power plants and other industrial facilities.

The first official day of committee activity in the 113th Congress saw the advancement of two hydropower bills with bipartisan support in the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday proposed four reforms intended to reduce the time and cost to process transmission interconnection requests from generating facilities of 20 MW or smaller. The reforms would boost reliability by increasing energy supply and remove hurdles in the development of new renewable power sources, FERC said.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the grid operator that oversees 85% of Texas’ electric load, should consider additional potential solutions to address its worrisome resource adequacy and provide a plan outlining measures it will take to increase woefully low reserve margins, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) said in a strongly worded letter last week.

The Department of Energy (DOE) quietly unveiled a new strategy for the management and disposal of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel on Friday. The strategy calls for a phased, consent-based approach to siting and implementing a nuclear waste management and disposal system, and it endorses building a pilot interim storage facility by 2021.