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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has invoked emergency authority to compel Puerto Rico’s public utility to dispatch mothballed oil-fired and fossil-fueled power units, citing an imminent threat to grid […]
The post DOE Orders Fossil Units Online After Puerto Rico Blackouts, Citing Dispatchable Capacity Need appeared first on POWER Magazine.
The post Georgia Power Orders First Fuel Load for Vogtle Unit 4 appeared first on POWER Magazine.
Georgia Power on March 5 announced it has ordered the first nuclear fuel load for Vogtle Unit 4, as work continues on the first new-design reactors in the U.S. in more than 30 years. Fuel for Unit 3 of the two-unit expansion at Vogtle was ordered last summer.
The completion of the fuel order for Unit 4 is another milestone for the project at the Plant Vogtle site near Waynesboro, Georgia. The project is now approximately 84% complete, according to Georgia Power. The two AP1000 (Advanced Passive) units each have generation capacity of 1,117 MW.
Southern Co., the parent of Georgia Power, in an email to POWER on Thursday said the order consists of 157 fuel assemblies, each 14 feet tall. According to Georgia Power, “The fuel will eventually be loaded into the reactor vessels to support startup once the reactors begin operating.…
General Electric, Siemens, and Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems confirmed their gas turbine sales for the year’s first quarter, with GE taking the top spot with six orders for its advanced HA-class unit.
The three companies on May 14 confirmed the numbers to Reuters. GE, which had no sales in the same period a year ago, said its total includes three units purchased by Japan’s Tokyo Electric Power Co. Those units were not included in the company’s first-quarter earnings report, but were noted in the industry’s closely studied “McCoy Power Report,” which was published Tuesday. McCoy has not commented on the report.
Sources told Reuters, and the companies confirmed, that MHPS had five turbine orders in the first quarter, while Siemens had four.
The three companies have struggled to book turbine orders in recent years as the power industry moves toward renewable generation resources such as wind and solar. Each company has rolled out new, more-efficient models in an effort to gain market share.…
A state court ordered Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to turn over more than 2,500 emails his office withheld from open records requests relating to communications with coal, oil, and gas corporations. The order came a day before the Senate is poised to confirm him as President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The Senate is set to vote on Pruitt’s confirmation at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, February 27. It is unclear if the order by Oklahoma District Court Judge Aletia Haynes Timmons late on Thursday afternoon will delay the vote.
Judge Timmons gave Pruitt’s office until Tuesday, February 21 to turn over the emails it withheld from the Center for Media and Democracy’s (CMD’s) January 2015 records request. The judge also gave Pruitt’s office just 10 days to turn over an undetermined number of documents that relate to five additional open records requests filed between November 2015 and August 2016.
According to the CMD, on February 10, Pruitt’s office “finally responded” to the oldest of the watchdog organization’s nine outstanding Open Records Act requests, but it provided just 411 of the more than 3,000 emails they had located.…
A federal court has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to file a plan and schedule to evaluate the consequences of its air pollution rules on jobs, finding for a giant coal company that is suing the agency for an alleged “war on coal” waged over the past five years.
In an October 17 summary judgment, U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia ordered the agency to file the plan and schedule within 14 days.
The EPA must fully comply with a provision in the Clean Air Act (Section 321[a]) adopted by Congress in 1977 that requires the agency to continually evaluate job losses, which may stem from air pollution rules, said Bailey. Moreover, if the EPA refused to conduct the required evaluation, it would constitute an “abuse of discretion,” owing to the importance, widespread effects, and the claims of the coal industry, he said.
Irreparable Harm
The case stems from a lawsuit filed in March 2011 by troubled coal giant Murray Energy Corp.…