POWERnews

The State of Vermont "repeatedly failed" to present to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) objections that Entergy Corp., owner of the controversial Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station, lacked a necessary state water permit before the commission granted the reactor a 20-year operating license extension, a federal court ruled on Tuesday as it threw out the state’s legal challenge against the NRC.

In response to a court order, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed updates on Friday to its national air quality standards for harmful fine particle pollution, including soot (known as PM2.5). The agency says that 99% of U.S. counties are projected to meet proposed standards without any additional actions.

The United States is in a "fierce race" to compete in global solar energy markets, and its success depends on innovation and deploying solar energy at scale, said Steven Chu, secretary of the Department of Energy. He spoke at the SunShot Grand Challenge summit and technology forum in Denver last week. Chu called on the solar industry to drive down costs to enable the technology to compete against natural gas at a price of around $4 per million Btu.

Unexpected steam generator tube wear that prompted the indefinite shutdown of Southern California Edison’s (SCE’s) San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in January was caused by excessive tube vibration, company executives confirmed at a community meeting on Monday. Officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) meanwhile pinned the tube failures on a flawed computer model used to design the steam generator components.

Though many have touted the vast promise of ocean energy, it has been slow to reach commercial scale, especially in North America. Today, offshore generating technologies are less of an impediment to commercial project fruition than permitting, financing, and transmission challenges, but small changes are beginning to brighten the outlook for the newest power industry sector.

The U.S. Senate on Wednesday narrowly rejected a measure that would have overturned the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), voting 46 to 53 to defeat the resolution introduced by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.).

In an effort to slash its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the California Department of Water Resources (CDWR) last week said it would terminate a contract to buy power from a units of NV Energy’s Reid Gardner coal-fired power plant in Nevada and instead rely on power from Northern California Power Agency’s (NCPA) 255-MW Lodi combined cycle natural gas-fired plant, which is under construction.

San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) on Monday completed and put into service its 500-kV Sunrise Powerlink, a $1.9 billion transmission line linking San Diego to the renewables-rich Imperial Valley.

A host of new technologies are ready to transform the energy system, offering the potential to drastically reduce carbon emissions, enhance energy security, and generate a huge investment return, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a new energy technology publication launched on Monday.

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.