POWERnews

The U.S. Supreme Court last week heard oral arguments in Entergy v. EPA, a case that questions an appellate court decision that said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot conduct a cost-benefit analysis in regulating how power plants use cooling water from rivers and lakes. Power companies and the EPA—pitted against environmental groups led by […]

Alstom and Polish company PGE Elektrownia Belchatow S.A. on Monday announced they had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to develop and implement carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology at the 4,440-MW Belchatow power plant in Poland—Europe’s largest conventional power station. In the first phase of the Polish project, Alstom will design and construct a […]

A feasibility study released Nov. 27 by Ontario’s Bruce Power has concluded that nuclear energy could add 1,000 MW of electricity to the Saskatchewan power grid by 2020. The company considered three reactor designs during the feasibility study: Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.’s ACR-1000, Westinghouse’s AP1000, and Areva’s EPR.

On Nov. 25, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced that it had docketed, or accepted for review, a combined construction and operating license (COL) application for a new reactor at the Fermi site in Michigan. Detroit Edison’s application, submitted Sept. 18, is the 12th COL request the agency has accepted for review.

American Electric Power Co. said on Monday that a unit at one of its nuclear power plants damaged in September will not return to full service until 2010. The company also estimated the cost of repairing and replacing the damaged turbine rotors in Cook Nuclear Plant’s Unit 1 at up to $332 million. AEP figures to recover most of the cost through insurance and warranties.

Everyone knows that China is building coal-fired power plants at a furious rate in China, but less well-known are its construction projects abroad, including in India and Indonesia. And on Dec. 1, CIC Energy announced that it had selected China’s power station builder Shanghai Electric Group Co. Ltd. (SEC) to be the EPC contractor for a 1,320-MW power plant at its $3 billion Mmamabula coal mine and electricity generation plant in Botswana.

On the day after Thanksgiving, four federal agencies released a Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (Final PEIS) proposing to designate more than 6,000 miles of energy transport corridors on federal lands in 11 western states.

New ways of squeezing out greater efficiency from solar photovoltaic cells are emerging from computer simulations and lab tests conducted by a team of physicists and engineers at MIT.

The Marine Corps wants its base at Kaneohe Bay to become energy self-sufficient by 2015. One step toward that goal involves building a sizable solar power array around Kansas Tower Hill, which could be operating by next fall.

Power producers in politically unstable regions of the world are finding that generating capacity is useless unless they can ensure the reliable delivery of fuel to run their power plants. Such was the dark lesson in both Nigeria and Gaza in the past week.