When it comes to saving energy and pursuing sustainability, corporate peer pressure can be a wonderful thing.
That’s the experience of Walmart, which since 2010 has been using its own environmental policies, along with its considerable corporate muscle, to persuade suppliers to join its ongoing campaign to reduce carbon emissions. Keep reading →
Russia’s gas giant Gazprom chairman and Deputy Prime Minister, Viktor Zubkov (R), applauds as he and Gazprom CEO, Alexei Miller (L), attend the world biggest gas company’s annual meeting in Moscow on June 29, 2012.
Russia’s natural-gas monopoly OAO Gazprom (GAZP.RS) isn’t considering a buyback of its own shares to support the market price, its Chief Executive Alexei Miller said Friday. Keep reading →
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, will leverage its scale to bring affordable renewable power to consumers using its experience from the retail industry.
Rahul Raj, director of sustainability and merchandising innovation at Walmart.com, said that the retail giant aspires to 100% renewable power. Keep reading →
Trucks associated with hydraulic fracturing natural gas wells drive through the countryside on January 18, 2012 in Springville, Pennsylvania.
Consol Energy, which produces billions of gallons of wastewater doing hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale in the Northeast U.S., is turning for help to a startup that’s got a solar-powered method of purifying water. Keep reading →
The Obama administration will go ahead with more drilling in Arctic waters, though at a pace that allows for more research before additional permits are granted. The administration will hold new lease sales for oil companies to drill in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas just north of Alaska, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Tuesday in a conference call with reporters. But the new leases won’t be issued until 2016, allowing more time so that nations bordering the Arctic can identify the region’s resources and figure out which areas need to be protected. “These resources, if developed safely, can be an important component to the all-of-the-above energy strategy,” said Salazar.
Duke Energy and Progress Energy said Monday that they have accepted federal regulators’ conditions for completing their merger and hope to close the deal by Sunday. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruled earlier this month that the utility companies could combine their operations, but only if they meet conditions designed to ensure that the company wouldn’t exercise undue influence over the power markets in the Carolinas. Duke and Progress are also working to secure approval from regulators in North Carolina and South Carolina by this weekend. The all-stock deal, announced in January 2011 and valued at about $26 billion, would create the nation’s largest utility. Duke, of Charlotte, N.C., serves 4 million customers in the Carolinas, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, operates wholesale power and renewable-energy businesses and has international operations in Brazil and elsewhere.
The power industry has conducted a complex dance of consolidation and division over the past few decades in response to technological disruption, regulatory trends and financial shifts.
Recent years have brought about a new wave of consolidation and utility bankers have been busy ushering companies into new larger footprints through buying complementary assets rather than embarking on broad new competition-based construction and infrastructure investment programs. Constellation is now part of Exelon, and Duke Energy is adding further to its portfolio with the acquisition of Progress Energy, the two highest-profile deals in a spate of transactions all the more surprising for the tightness in financial markets since the 2008 crisis. Keep reading →
The US utility industry will look fundamentally different within the next forty years as a paradigm shift transforms the sector, the chief of one of the country’s largest energy providers said.
“We’re going to reinvent our business, we’re going to adopt new technologies,” said Jim Rogers, Duke Energy CEO. “When you look at our company four decades from now it will to look fundamentally different. Keep reading →
The energy sector is one of the most regulated in the US, and at the same time, one of the most innovative industries in the world.
Amid a tidal wave of change wrought by IT, communications technology, engineering advances and huge economic shifts the energy business has not just managed to keep the lights on and transport moving – it has launched thousands upon thousands of megawatts of new energy generation technologies and changed the outlook for one of the world’s fundamental sources of development and growth. Keep reading →
