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Representatives from the electrical industry sharply criticized on Tuesday a proposal in the House to extend federal regulation to include local power plants in major cities to protect them and the national power grid from cyberattacks. Under the 1935 Federal Power Act, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission enforces security standards for most of the nation's power plants, including facilities and control networks -- known as bulk power systems -- that connect power systems. But the commission does not have regulatory jurisdiction over electrical systems outside the continental United States and to local distribution facilities, which include some in large cities...

Minnesota Power is seeking an almost 20 percent increase in rates for its residential customers to cover investments made in cleaner, greener energy. For the average residential customer, that amounts to $13 per month. “We know this is unwelcome news at an unwelcome time,” said Pat Mullen, the company’s vice president of marketing and public affairs. “These are improvements that need to be made. It is creating an environment that we all value.”

If, like me, you happen to live anywhere in the northeastern portion of the United States, you may well remember what you were doing on the afternoon of August 14, 2003. It was one of those particularly hot, sticky days when it seemed far easier to focus on indoor activities and leave the air conditioning running. Then, around four in the afternoon, the air conditioner stopped. This was accompanied by the lights going off, the stereo falling silent, and the overhead fan slowing winding to a halt. Initially we assumed that a fuse had blown, given that the house we...

A 28-year-old man died early this morning in Pueblo while trying to steal electrical wiring from a high voltage electrical box... The man, Brian Repinski of Pueblo, was brought unconscious to Parkview Hospital suffering from high voltage burns. Duran said interviews were conducted with associates of Repinski. They said the electrocution occurred on Greenhorn Drive while Repinski and an accomplice were attempting to steal the wiring. Detectives are continuing their investigation to determine whether Repinski and his associates were involved in other recent thefts and burglaries.

Their partnership will see, from today, the first fully-fledged smart meter in people's homes and marks a significant step towards Google's goal of collecting as much information about the world as possible. The software allows customers to see exactly how much energy they are using and whether it is above or below average. People can click on a graph to examine their usage on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis. From next month they will be able to monitor how many pounds and pence they are spending on an hourly basis. They will be able to find out this...

Would you sign up for a discount with your power company in exchange for surrendering control of your thermostat? What if it means that, one day, your auto insurance company will know that you regularly arrive home on weekends at 2:15 a.m., just after the bars close? Welcome to the complex world of the Smart Grid, which may very well pit environmental concerns against thorny privacy issues. If you think such debates are purely philosophical, you’re behind the times.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Tuesday will announce $3.4 billion in government grants to help build a "smart" electric grid that will save consumers money on their utility bills, reduce blackouts and carry power supplies generated by solar and wind energy, the White House said. It marks the largest award made in a single day from the $787 billion stimulus package approved by Congress, and will create tens of thousands of jobs while upgrading the U.S. electric grid, according to administration officials. The grants, which range from $400,000 to $200 million, will go to 100 companies, utilities, manufacturers,...

President Barack Obama will announce a $3.4 billion investment of stimulus funds to modernize the electric grid at an event in Arcadia, Fla., Tuesday, administration officials said. One-hundred private companies, utilities, manufacturers, cities and others will receive grants of between $400,000 and $200 million to help build a nationwide "smart energy grid" that will cut costs for consumers and make the nation's electrical system more reliable. The grants are expected to create tens of thousands of jobs - the administration did not say exactly how many - and also lay down the infrastructure to create a new renewable energy industry,...

I'm not in the position for making any huge investments, and this might be in the category of just plain ignorant, but I figure this proposal might at least prompt some interesting discussion, and if its plausible, someone should do it: The Tesla gets about 220 miles per charge. Great... if you're going somewhere less than four hours away. But if the S-class (a $50,000 "family car") is going to be someone's main car, they're certainly going to want to take longer trips with it. The problem is the car takes 8 hours to charge with 110 volts. By doubling...

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is giving a jolt to the futuristic "smart" electric grid, hoping to more quickly bring America's power transmission system into the digital age. President Barack Obama, during a visit to a solar energy facility in Arcadia, Fla., is announcing Tuesday that he is making available $3.4 billion in government support for 100 projects aimed at modernizing the power grid. The projects include installing "smart" electric meters in homes, automating utility substations, and installing thousands of new digital transformers and grid sensors.

The developers behind a proposed Elmore County nuclear plant have now applied for another site in western Idaho. Alternate Energy Holdings Inc., which shifted its proposed plant from Owyhee County to a site near Hammett in early 2008, has asked for a comprehensive-plan amendment for a remote, 5,100-acre site in northern Payette County. Company officials said in August that delays in the Elmore County process led them to consider other options, though spokesman Martin Johncox said Tuesday that AEHI is not leaving Elmore County. "If we indeed want to build a nuclear power plant, we have to press forward, and...

Politics: Move over, John McCain and Olympia Snowe. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is fast becoming the Democrats' favorite Republican as he partners with John Kerry to push cap-and-trade through the Senate. Earlier this year, eight Republican congressmen made it possible for Waxman-Markey, the 1,400-page job- and economy-killing cap-and-trade legislation, to barely pass the House of Representatives. At the time it seemed dead on arrival in the Senate if it was brought up there this year. Once again, as with their medical plan, the Democrats seek to better the odds by putting a GOP hood ornament on a Democratic clunker....

PARIS — From the time the world’s first commercial nuclear power plants were switched on in the late 1950s, installed generating capacity rose rapidly over two decades. It leveled off in the 1980s as new building programs were scrapped in the wake of the accident at Three Mile Island, among other factors. Contractors generally designed plants to last for 40 years — a standard enshrined in the United States in the adoption by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or N.R.C., of a 40-year licensing regime. A large part of the world’s installed nuclear power capacity is now coming to the end...

Reporting from Sacramento - The influential lobby group Consumer Electronics Assn. is fighting what appears to be a losing battle to dissuade California regulators from passing the nation's first ban on energy-hungry big-screen televisions.

The U.S. may soon get its first nuclear reactor in more than 30 years. UniStar Nuclear Energy — a joint venture between Baltimore-based Constellation Energy and the EDF Group — has proposed a new reactor for southern Maryland capable of generating 1,600 megawatts and powering 1.3 million homes twenty-four hours a day. To put this in context, the largest wind power installation in the world, the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in Texas, generates 735 megawatts — but only when it’s windy. Nuclear, by comparison, is massive. Having cleared the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the New York Public Service...

WASHINGTON — The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Thursday that it had rejected a design by Westinghouse for a new reactor because a key component might not withstand events like earthquakes and tornadoes. The rejection raises the possibility of delays in building 14 planned reactors in the United States, including two twin-reactor projects in Georgia and South Carolina that are leading the pack. ~~~SNIP~~~ In a conference call on Thursday with reporters, David Matthews, director of the division of new reactor licensing in the commission’s Office of New Reactors, said staff members were not convinced that a crucial part of the...

Reporting from Sacramento - The influential lobby group Consumer Electronics Assn. is fighting what appears to be a losing battle to dissuade California regulators from passing the nation's first ban on energy-hungry big-screen televisions. On Tuesday, executives and consultants for the Arlington, Va., trade group asked members of the California Energy Commission to instead let consumers use their wallets to decide whether they want to buy the most energy-saving new models of liquid-crystal display and plasma high-definition TVs.

Clovis, New Mexico, might just be the cornerstone of a clean-energy revolution. It might also be the epicenter of a political battle over how America embraces green energy. Clovis is the site chosen for the Tres Amigas electricity-transmission project, as our colleague Rebecca Smith reports today in The Wall Street Journal. The idea is to build a powerful substation in New Mexico using advanced supercondctors that could physically connect the three otherwise isolated power grids—the Eastern, the Western, and Texas grids. The project, which could take five years to finish, seeks to remedy one of the problems with renewable energy:...

"It may not give you 'The Drive of Your Life', as its makers Peugeot may try to claim, but the latest micro electric car is creating huge excitement in the automotive industry. The Peugeot BB1, a cross between a scooter and a car, is powered by two electric motors which are mounted in the rear wheels. A silver prototype BB1had residents and tourists stopping to take a closer peak when a prototype version rolled into Paris today. Inspired by Peugeot’s electric VLV from the 1940s, the new all-electric BB1 represents the car firm’s view for the future of electrical-based urban...

It may not give you 'The Drive of Your Life', as its makers Peugeot may try to claim, but the latest micro electric car is creating huge excitement in the automotive industry. The Peugeot BB1, a cross between a scooter and a car, is powered by two electric motors which are mounted in the rear wheels. Inspired by Peugeot’s electric VLV from the 1940s, the new all-electric BB1 represents the car firm’s view for the future of electrical-based urban mobility. The Peugeot BB1, a cross between a scooter and a car, is powered by two electric motors which are mounted...

Researchers have figured out a way to plug into the power generated by trees. Scientists have known for some time that plants can conduct electricity. In fact, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that plants can pack up to 200 millivolts of electrical power. A millivolt is one-thousandth of a volt. And although the popular potato or lemon battery experiments have shown that an electrical current can be generated by creating a reaction between the food and two different metals, power is harvested from trees through a different mechanism. "We specifically didn't want to confuse this effect with...

Here's a seemingly simple solar power fact*: the sun bathes Earth with enough energy in one hour (4.3 x 1020 joules) to more than fill all of humanity's present energy use in a year (4.1 x 1020 joules). So how to convert it? In the world of solar energy harvesting, there's a constant battle between cost and efficiency. On the one hand, complex and expensive triple-junction photovoltaic cells can turn more than 40 percent of the (specially concentrated) sunlight that falls on them into electricity. On the other, cheap, plastic solar cells under development convert less than 5 percent. In...

US scientists are a step closer to producing a new generation of energy conversion devices, thanks to an advance in liquid crystal (LC) technology.Antal Jákli, at Kent State University, and colleagues have made use of a property called flexoelectricity, where materials, such as LCs, convert mechanical energy into electrical energy when they are flexed. The LCE's volume swells by around a factor of two when it absorbs the bent-core LCs Bent-core nematics (BCNs) - LCs made from banana-shaped molecules - are particularly flexoelectric but because of their fluidity, they are not robust or flexible enough to use in energy conversion...

Consumers and businesses may finally be seeing some relief from rising utility bills, thanks to the biggest decline in U.S. electricity demand in decades.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first time the word “transistor” appeared in print was in The New York Times on July 1, 1948, in a Page 46 roundup headed “The News of Radio.” The unsigned article opened with a report of two new radio shows, one called “Mr. Tutt,” and the other titled “Our Miss Brooks,” “with Eve Arden playing the role of a school teacher who encounters a variety of adventures.” The column’s last item began, “A device called a transistor, which has several applications in radio where a vacuum tube ordinarily is employed, was demonstrated for...

FALLUJAH — A 132-kilovolt substation, projected for completion in October, will result in more consistent and stable electricity for residents here. The $14.8 million project is being managed by the Gulf Region Division, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq, and funded by the Iraqi Relief and Reconstruction Fund. The substation was damaged in a fire caused by circuit breaker failure in January 2005, and was identified by the Division’s Gulf Region District as a significant capacity-building project for the city. Maj. Joseph Geary, the officer in charge of the District’s Fallujah resident office, praised the team for working steadfastly...

Conservation: The Chevy Volt is said to be able to get 230 miles per gallon. That's if it's continually plugged into a fragile and overburdened power grid. Where will you be when the lights go out? Since most U.S. electricity generation is not carbon-free, the Congressional Research Service agrees. The "widespread adoption of plug-in hybrid vehicles through 2030 may have only a small effect on, and might actually increase, carbon emissions," it observes. "If you are using coal-fired power plants and half the country's electricity comes from coal powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?"...

Infrastructure: The stimulus plan to turn America's electrical infrastructure into a so-called "smart grid" is a potential target for unfriendly hackers. It's also the fulfillment of a campaign promise rooted in socialism.There is $4.5 billion in the stimulus package to modernize the nation's electricity system. The whole idea is to monitor where and when electricity is used and to direct it to where and when it is needed. It is thought this will help utilities to adjust their rates to immediate supply and demand for power. It would supposedly allow consumers to adjust their consumption to the times when they...

Cap-And-Trade: The administration likes to defend bad policies with analogies to the post office. New studies from a business group and the administration itself confirm that cap-and-trade belongs in the dead-letter bin.Along with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Rep. Ed Markey likens the cost of the Waxman-Markey cap-and trade bill to "about a postage stamp a day," based on estimates made by the Congressional Budget Office and the EPA. But as we and others have shown, they arrive at this magical number in part by ignoring the hit on gross domestic product and employment that will occur. As Garret Vaughan, economist...

<p>SORRY, the new Chevrolet Volt does not promise a "green" revolution -- indeed, the car could trigger a whole new wave of blackouts.</p> <p>Chevrolet notes that the key to high-mileage performance to the tune of 230 miles per gallon "is for a Volt driver to plug into the electric grid at least once each day" to get "40 miles of electric-only, petroleum-free driving."</p>

One can measure the dedication of the climate-change crowd in how they approach the zero-emissions technology of nuclear power. Some have realized that the only practical way to replace coal as a source for electricity is to invest heavily in nuclear power. Others, such as Harry Reid and his allies in the Senate, have done their best to shut the door on that path away from coal, which calls into question their motives in forcing cap-and-trade schemes onto the US. Investors Business Daily rips Reid and the administration for blocking the use of Yucca Mountain for safe fuel reprocessing, which...

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- The Sierra Club has joined other environmental groups in intervening in Virginia proceedings to try to block a high-voltage multistate transmission line. The Sierra Club, represented by Earthjustice, said it filed papers Monday with Virginia's State Corporation Commission. SCC spokesman Ken Schrad says Monday was the deadline for intervening in the $1.9 billion line proposed by Pennsylvania's Allegheny Energy Co. and Ohio's American Electric Power Co. The Piedmont Environmental Council and the National Wildlife Federation also have filed notices of participation. The 765-kilovolt Potomac-Appalachian Transmission Highline, or PATH, would run across parts of northern Virginia and...

Updated: 4:01 pm EDT July 24, 2009 HIALEAH, Fla. -- A man died Thursday afternoon after touching a downed power line, according to the Hialeah Police Department. A major storm cell passed through Hialeah, Fla., at about 1:30 p.m., Miami station WPLG reported. Police said there was a downed power line in the road. The victim, who officers said was trying to be a Good Samaritan, attempted to move the live cable with his bare hands. He was electrocuted, police said. Dunia Malimi heard a clash of thunder and ran outside the gas station where she works. She saw a...

Energy Policy: Obama announces his energy team without mentioning a green source of renewable energy that could create jobs, reduce carbon emissions and reinvigorate a vital manufacturing sector — nuclear power.The domestic auto industry isn't the only uncompetitive industry that seems to require life-sustaining transfusions of government cash to stay in business. Alternative energy sources have relied on such subsidies, called "investments," for years. Yet in President-elect Obama's announcement of his energy team, we were told "the foundations of our energy independence" lie in "the power of wind and solar." Except that for these alternative sources there's been a severe...

Alternative Energy: A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another..."If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?" asks Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report. The report itself notes: "Reductions in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy."

Here's a story to melt the mind. Residents in Missouri will get a new fee added to their electric bill for using less energy. Why are they being charged more for using less? The money is spent on promotions by the utilities to get people using less energy. If electricity consumption grows then the utilities need to build new power plants, which is expensive. The cost of new power plant is greater than the cost of promoting conservation of electricity. The EPA estimates that conservation plans like this will add 3% to electricity rates, but customers participating in the conservation...

California officials are beginning to worry that the state's focus on transitioning to renewable-energy sources could lead to power shortages in the near term. The state has been so keen to develop renewables that relatively few conventional power generators, such as gas-fired plants, have been built lately. That risks a possible energy shortfall in certain places if the economy rebounds any time soon. California's utilities are barreling ahead to try to meet a state mandate to garner 33% of their power from renewable sources by 2020, and some officials are concerned the effort might push up electricity prices and crimp...

Climate Change: A switch of four Republican votes would have defeated Waxman-Markey, the Democrats' global warming legislation. But like the Clinton Btu tax, the bill could die in the Senate and turn the House over to the GOP. What were these RINOs thinking? The GOP is supposed to be the party of low taxes and free markets. Rep. Mike Castle, one of the eight offered an explanation right off of President Obama's teleprompter...Illinois Republican Mark Kirk, who has senatorial ambitions to replace the choice of impeached former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Sen. Roland Burris, demonstrates why GOP fortunes in the Land...

Climate Change: A suppressed EPA study says old U.N. data ignore the decline in global temperatures and other inconvenient truths. Was the report kept under wraps to influence the vote on the cap-and-trade bill? This was supposed to be the most transparent administration ever. Yet as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill, the largest tax increase in U.S. history on 100% of Americans, an attempt was made to suppress a study shredding supporters' arguments.

June 26, 2009, 4:00 a.m. The Renewable-Energy ScamNew legislation would force Americans to buy costlier electricity. By Daren Bakst It’s a tried-and-true way to make money off costly, inferior products: Get the government to force the public to buy them. This is exactly what is happening with renewable electricity. The House and Senate are both considering renewable-electricity “standards.� These standards require that utilities generate or purchase a certain percentage of electricity from renewable-energy sources. Electricity customers, not the utilities, pay for the higher costs and the inferior quality of renewables. On Friday, the House is expected to consider the...

Fiscal Policy: The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on an anti-stimulus package that in the name of saving the earth will destroy the American economy. Smoot-Hawley will seem like a speed bump...As we've said before, capping emissions is capping economic growth. An analysis of Waxman-Markey by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million. Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once...

Menlo Park, Calif.—Move over, silicon—it may be time to give the Valley a new name. Physicists at the Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have confirmed the existence of a type of material that could one day provide dramatically faster, more efficient computer chips. Recently-predicted and much-sought, the material allows electrons on its surface to travel with no loss of energy at room temperatures and can be fabricated using existing semiconductor technologies. Such material could provide a leap in microchip speeds, and even become the bedrock of an entirely new kind of computing industry based...

Thomas Alva Edison, meet the Internet. More than a century after Edison invented a reliable light bulb, the nation's electricity-distribution system, an aging spider web of power lines, is poised to move into the digital age. The "smart grid" has become the buzz of the electric-power industry, at the White House and among members of Congress. President Obama says it's essential to boost development of wind and solar power, get people to use less energy and tackle climate change. What smart-grid visionaries see coming are home thermostats and individual appliances that adjust automatically based on the cost of power, and...

Weapons experts and techno-thriller fans are familiar with the concept of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) — a supermassive blast of electricity, usually from a nuclear blast high above ground, that fries electronic circuits for miles around, crippling computers, cars and most other modern gadgets. Now comes word that a much smaller EMP device, or “e-bomb,” could be carried in a car, or even on someone’s person — and be used to take down an airliner.

TVA To Reduce Fuel Cost Adjustment for Third Straight Quarter in July May 15, 2009 TVA today announced that the quarterly fuel cost adjustment will decrease for the third straight quarter for billing periods beginning July 1. This decrease, in addition to reductions on Jan. 1 and April 1, will more than offset the 17-percent FCA increase in October 2008. Overall, the decrease for the fourth quarter of the 2009 fiscal year will be a 4.1-percent reduction on total average wholesale rates, which is a reduction of approximately 35 percent from the current quarter’s fuel cost adjustment amount, bringing it...

The myth of the electric car is exploded by the Royal Society of Chemistry in a hard-hitting piece featured in the influential journal Research Fortnight, published today. In it, the RSC chief executive, Dr Richard Pike, says: "...in the UK right now there is a woolly thinking, a lack of scientific scrutiny and, from 2011, a potential waste of £250 million of public money, to subsidise the purchase of over 50,000 vehicles." The article goes on to assert: Carbon emissions advantage of the electric car in today's UK would be small. 50,000 electric cars would lower the total UK carbon...

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Global electricity use forecast to fall By Kate Mackenzie in London Published: May 21 2009 19:52 | Last updated: May 21 2009 19:52 Global electricity consumption will fall this year for the first time since 1945, according to the International Energy Agency. The watchdog for developed energy consuming countries will tell energy ministers from the Group of Eight leading economies on Sunday that electricity demand will fall 3.5 per cent in 2009. In China, where power use is seen as a more reliable barometer of economic activity than official economic measures, consumption will be more than 2 per cent lower...

DHI QAR — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Gulf Region Division has completed and delivered a modern, reliable electrical distribution system to the Minister of Electricity in Dhi Qar province. The $24 million effort that spanned three years will provide residents of Dhi Qar with stable, reliable electricity. The electrical work was done as two separate projects. The first project, which began in 2006, was the construction of a new $14.8 million, 132-kilovolt overhead transmission line linking the al-Shatra substation and the Nasiriyah power plant. The second project was a $9.2 million upgrade to the 132/33/11 kilovolt al-Shatra substation...

Clean energy and federal standards are hot topics in the nation's capital these days. One issue tossed around by policy wonks is the possibility of creating a national standard for how much electricity must be obtained from renewable resources. However, any consideration of a federal renewable electricity standard (RES) must start with a basic truth about energy production and usage: Markets talk; mandates shock. Take a look at the federal mandate to add ethanol to gasoline. Most people (except those in Congress) agree it helped lead to last year's global food-price explosion while also degrading the environment. Not to mention...