POWERnews

In a long-running labor dispute, Entergy Corp. on June 7 locked out union workers at its Pilgrim nuclear plant 38 miles southeast of Boston near Plymouth, Mass., bringing in workers from its other plants and contract workers to operate the 685-MW unit along with management officials.

Natural gas-fired generation enjoyed a competitive advantage through this past winter and spring as historically low prices for the commodity combined with mild weather and relatively light demand to turn the dispatch stack on its head and favor gas over coal. That advantage is narrowing as summer demand approaches. A senior market analyst with Bentek Energy expects coal-fired generation to be advantaged at least until the fall shoulder season.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Circuit ruled unanimously on Friday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) erred in deciding that spent nuclear fuel (SNF) from the nation’s power plants could be stored as long as 60 years after a plant’s operating license expires.

PPL Corp. last week shut down Unit 2 of its Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Luzerne County, Pa., for a planned inspection of its turbine. Unit 1 of the two-reactor plant was shut down after workers in April found cracks similar to damage discovered and repaired in 2011.

Regulated utility South Carolina Electric & Gas (SCE&G) last week filed plans with the Public Service Commission of South Carolina to retire up to six coal-fired units—a total capacity of 750 MW—by 2018. The units are some of the utility’s “oldest and smallest,” and it would not be a “good business decision” to add costly environmental control equipment to these plants, SCE&G said.

American Electric Power (AEP) last week temporarily withdrew a $1 billion plan to retrofit its 49-year-old Big Sandy coal-fired plant near Louisa, Ky., from the Kentucky Public Service Commission (PSC), saying it wanted to reevaluate alternatives to meeting the company’s obligations under the recently finalized federal Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, the Mercury and Air Toxic Standard, and other environmental standards.

A federal court on Friday ruled that collection of a fee by the Department of Energy that totaled nearly $750 million a year from nuclear generators for nuclear waste disposal since 1983 was “legally defective” because development of the Yucca Mountain permanent spent fuel waste facility had been discontinued. But in lieu of suspending the fee, the court ordered the DOE to conduct a reevaluation of the Nuclear Waste Fund within six months.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week issued a Notice of Data Availability (NODA) as a supplement to its April 2011 proposed rule for cooling water intake structures at all existing power facilities as part of section 316(b) of the Clean Water Act.

A report released on Friday by consultants at the Brattle Group concludes that tripling peak wholesale power prices in Texas (from $3,000/MWh to $9,000/MWh by 2015), as is being considered by Texas utility commissioners and grid operators to encourage power plant construction in the power-strapped state, would only raise the region’s reserve margin to 10% above peak demand—less than the 13.75% reserve margin recommended by federal regulators.

Nearly three-quarters of the 74 transmission line outages were caused by fallen trees during a snowstorm that hit the Northeast in October 2011 and shut off the lights for more than 3.2 million homes and businesses, concludes a report released jointly by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC).