Texas legislators balanced the state budget this year by diverting money from a fund to help the poor pay for electricity.
Temperatures are still soaring past the century mark and refusing to subside, many Texans are trying to find ways to lower their electric bills. One option that some low-income residents relied on is no longer available. Keep reading →
Modeled after the LEED building certification, the Perfect Power Seal of Approval would recognize excellence in smart grid development.
Currently one of the primary goals of the Galvin Electricity Initiative, the seal would measure reliability, efficiency, cost and consumer empowerment metrics of microgrids and smart grid systems. It is intended as a way to standardize and ensure quality of what is for many customers often still a suspicious system. Keep reading →
Department of Energy plans to give federal regulators more authority over the siting of electricity transmission lines would delay development, provoke lawsuits, and damage federal-state relations, the utility commissioners’ trade group said.
The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners blasted the proposal to hand more power to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, saying it ignores court rulings and the intent of Congress, and would give the industry, rather than the government, control over the approval process. Keep reading →
With renewables ever more popular, the hottest new business may be flexible gas plants that can accommodate intermittent power generation.
An engine provider for both marine vessels and power plants, Finnish company Wärtsilä is busy expanding its flexible, fast-start gas-fired generation business in North America. On August 18, the company announced the commissioning of a new Modesta, California 49.6 MW natural gas plant, that uses six 20-cylinder 34SG Wärtsilä engines that can ramp up to full power within five minutes of being turned on and reach optimum efficiency within another five minutes. Keep reading →
Texans often have a kind of pride in the extreme weather their state can throw at them, but the ice storms of February 2011 tested even their tolerance as blackouts swept the state alongside freezing temperatures.
Many of the problems highlighted by the cold weather were potentially preventable, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said in a review of the incident earlier this year. But the response of those in the Texas power sector was without doubt heroic and swift. Keep reading →
Loved this story about a small public utility in Conn. The lights are on in Jewitt City. http://lnkd.in/WuYPXg katerowland2
Utilities battled to restore power to millions of customers in the US northeast early Sunday after high winds and flooding from Hurricane Irene caused widespread outages.
By about 9 a.m. Sunday, four utilities covering parts of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Washington DC reported 1.48 million customers were without power after the storm toppled trees, knocking out local power lines. Keep reading →
An unusual East Coast earthquake and an equally rare vicious north-moving hurricane bound up the US East Coast Monday left many in the energy business wondering if they should begin preparing for a locust infestation. The Biblical end to the summer rounds up months of crisis that have included a nuclear disaster in Japan and an unprecedented US debt crisis and massive grid-testing heatwaves in Texas.
Utilities, pipeline operators, refineries and transmission grid firms scrambled in the closing days of the week as Hurricane Irene approached the Carolina coast. It was forecast to move along the US East Coast, gathering sustained power from the North Atlantic and impacting many of the country’s most populous areas across the weekend. Keep reading →
Electric utilities and nuclear power plants in the mid-Atlantic area braced for widespread power outages from Hurricane Irene which some warned could cause more power disruption than any previous storm.
“This could be the worst storm we have ever seen,” said Karen Muldoon Geus, a spokeswoman for PECO, which supplies power to 1.6 million residential and commercial power customers in five counties in and around Philadelphia where the storm is expected to hit late Saturday and into Sunday. Keep reading →
