POWERnews

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today proposed what it described as the “first-ever” national standards for “toxic air pollution” from power plants. The new rules—which will replace the court-vacated Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR)—will require new and existing coal- and oil-fired plants to install pollution control technologies to curb emissions of mercury, arsenic, chromium, nickel, and acid gases.

A federal judge in Birmingham, Ala., on Monday dismissed all claims in an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lawsuit that alleged Southern Co. subsidiary Alabama Power built or made modifications to existing coal-fired power plants in Alabama that were in violation of New Source Review (NSR) regulations under Prevention of Significant Deterioration provisions of the Clean Air Act.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) yesterday established a new rule that puts demand response (DR) on a par with power generation. The rule requires organized wholesale energy market operators to pay DR resources the market price for energy, known as the locational marginal price (LMP), when those resources have the capability to balance supply and demand as an alternative to a generation resource and when dispatch of those resources is cost-effective.

Xcel Energy wants to retire its last two coal-fired power plants (Units 3 and 4) at the Black Dog power plant in Burnsville, Minn., and replace them with natural gas–fired units. Black Dog Units 1 and 2 were converted to natural gas combined-cycle operation in 2002. Xcel says the conversion would be “more economical” than alternatives.

New York City and six states have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to decide on whether state and local governments have the right to sue private power companies under a common-law tort of public nuisance for their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The specter of meltdown and widespread radiation grows ever-more terrifying at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (TEPCO’s) Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture. Soon after a devastating magnitude 9.0 earthquake shook northeastern Japan on Friday, March 11, at 2:48 p.m. JST, the government declared an emergency as a precaution. Events have dramatically escalated since then, with four explosions and two fires afflicting four of the plant’s six reactors.

As U.S. lawmakers and energy experts urged federal regulators to delay decisions on reactor designs and new builds, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Gregory Jaczko said there was no need for concern about U.S. nuclear power. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday astonished the opposition and suspended an unpopular coalition decision made last fall to extend the lives of Germany’s 17 nuclear power plants. Merkel also ordered seven nuclear plants that began operating before 1980 to shut down until at least June. Switzerland took similar measures.

A new survey from Microsoft Corp. released at the CERAWeek 2011 conference in Houston, Texas, last week suggests that only 8% of utilities are progressing past smart grid planning into implementation. The survey also suggests that generally, budgets to support smart grid efforts are on the rise.

An audit of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) loan guarantee program for clean energy technologies completed last week by the agency’s inspector general found that the program could not always “readily demonstrate, through systematically organized records, including contemporaneous notes, how it resolved or mitigated relevant risks prior to granting loan guarantees.”

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) today announced its next-generation reactor model, the Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR), has received a positive final safety evaluation report (FSER) and final design approval (FDA) from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The FDA constitutes a finding by the NRC staff that the ESBWR design is safe and all technical issues have been resolved. It clears the way for the ESBWR to be built in countries around the world that recognize the FDA of a reactor design as acceptance by the “country of origin.”