POWERnews

Spanish wind turbine manufacturer Gamesa on Monday said it would start the permitting process for the installation of its first offshore prototype, the 50-Hz G128-5.0 MW at Arinaga Quay in Spain’s Gran Canary Island—not Cape Charles, Va., as it had initially proposed. The decision was driven by technical and wind resource considerations, offshore market trends, and investment return criteria, the firm said.

Integrys Energy Group subsidiary Wisconsin Public Service Corporation (WPS) on Monday filed for a Certificate of Authority (CA) from the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSCW) to install Regenerative Activated Coke Technology (ReACT) at its 321-MW Weston 3 plant.

Member states of the European Union (EU) will get a few more months to complete tests on their 147 nuclear power plants, and a final stress test report will be completed this fall—not this summer as initially expected— before any new nuclear safety laws are proposed, EU Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger said last week.

Canadian energy firms TransAlta, Capital Power, and Enbridge last week scrapped plans for the much-watched Project Pioneer, a joint effort the companies were to undertake with the Canadian federal government and Province of Alberta to demonstrate commercial-scale viability of carbon capture and storage technology (CCS).

Duke Energy and some of the Indiana’s key consumer groups on Friday reached a settlement agreement that resolves a disagreement concerning the utility’s consumer-paid cost overruns for its 618-MW integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plant at Edwardsport, Ind. The $3.3 billion coal-fired plant is almost complete and on schedule to begin operations this fall.

The nation’s complex, patchwork system of regional and local power plants, power lines, and transformers is in the worst shape it has ever been, with 70% of transmission lines and power transformers aged more than 25 years, and 60% of the nation’s circuit breakers currently more than 30 years old, suggests new report from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). At least $566 billion will be needed to revitalize the grid through 2020, the group warns.

Small-scale technology tests by the U.S. and Japan in the North Slope of Alaska have extracted a steady flow of natural gas from methane hydrates, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) said on Wednesday. If new research efforts to conduct long-term production tests in the Arctic and Gulf Coast are successful, they could unlock a “vast, entirely untapped resource” that would hold significant enormous potential for U.S. energy security, the agency said.

The events that left 2.7 million power customers in Southern California, Arizona, and Baja California in the dark on Sept. 8, 2011, stemmed from operating in an unsecured state due to inadequate planning, a lack of observability, and awareness of system operating conditions on the day of the event, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) concluded in a report released on Tuesday.

Costs for Progress Energy’s two news reactors proposed for Levy County have surged to between $19 and $24 billion, and the first unit could come online almost three years after initially planned, the company said in a statement on Monday. The North Carolina–based company had previously said the first unit at Levy would enter service in 2021 at an estimated cost of $17 billion to $22 billion.

Coal generation, as a percentage of total power output in the U.S., declined steadily to 39% at the end of 2011 from about 51% in 2002, while generation from natural gas–fired combined cycle plants grew to more than 20% from 10% over the same period, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said on Friday as it released its annual assessment for U.S. energy markets.