POWERnews

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott on Monday legally challenged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) disapproval of the state’s flexible permits program, a system which allows power plants, factories, refineries, and other industrial plants to exceed emission limits in certain areas as long as they stay within overall limits.

Hoosier Energy, an Indiana-based rural cooperative, on Friday reached an agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) to resolve alleged New Source Review (NSR) violations of the Clean Air Act.

Tampa Electric said on Monday it is participating in two DOE-funded demonstration projects at the company’s Big Bend and Polk Power Stations. The projects are designed to advance carbon dioxide capture technologies and could lead to the development of technologies on a large scale.

A federal appeals court on Monday reversed a January 2009 ruling by a North Carolina U.S. District Court that had declared emissions from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA’s) coal plants in eastern Tennessee and Alabama a public nuisance in North Carolina and ordered the nation’s largest public power provider to install expensive control technologies. The appeals court said the ruling was “flawed for several reasons.”

The $3.5 billion Taylorville Energy Center (TEC), a proposed integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plant with carbon capture and storage (CCS), has been awarded a $417 million investment tax credit under a program jointly administered by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Treasury Department. The tax credit is believed to be the largest ever granted to a single project.

PPL Montana will reportedly ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review an order from the Montana Supreme Court that requires it to pay “rent” for use of the riverbeds on which the company’s hydroelectric dams are built.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) failure to systematically assess development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies renders it unable to gauge their maturity and to provide resources required to move these technologies toward commercial demonstration, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a report released to the public last week.

With only about 13 days remaining before the U.S. Senate’s month-long summer recess is scheduled to begin, concerns are mounting about whether it may be too late to delve into an “energy-only bill,” let alone a “utility-only” carbon-curbing bill.

At least four militants reportedly stormed into a hydropower plant in Russia’s volatile North Caucasus region early this morning, shooting dead two security guards before detonating four bombs in a turbine hall and shutting down the plant.

The International Energy Administration (IEA) alleges, based on preliminary data, that China has overtaken the U.S. to become the world’s largest energy user. But China on Tuesday rejected that report, saying the IEA’s data is unreliable. The IEA said that China consumed 2.252 billion tons of oil equivalent in 2009—4% more than the 2.17 billion […]