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China’s omnivorous energy requirements have been attracting increasing attention as of late, as Beijing attempts to secure any and all sources of power for its growing industrial base. Nowhere is this more noticeable than Beijing’s policies in the South China Sea, where Chinese assertions of sovereignty are unsettling the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, all of whom have counter claims on the various shoals and islets. China’s landward neighbors are also feeling the hot breath of Beijing’s mandarins, however, most notably its economic rival India, with whom China fought a brief war in 1962 in the Himalayas over...

New water panel chairman wants more California projects built Michael Doyle | McClatchy Newspapers last updated: January 14, 2011 07:49:40 PM WASHINGTON — Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Elk Grove, could start making waves in California water. As new chairman of the House water and power subcommittee, McClintock can promote his pet projects while he squeezes environmentalists. Politically, this means renewed talk of an Auburn dam, stricter scrutiny of San Joaquin River restoration and more support for hydropower. "We need to change the central objective of our federal water and power policy, to one of abundance," McClintock said in an interview. "That...

ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia – Two carloads of assailants attacked a hydroelectric station in southern Russia early Wednesday, killing two workers and setting off bombs. The attack took place in Kabardino-Balkariya, one of the republics in Russia's restive Caucasus region where clashes with insurgents are frequent...

Surfing the wave of the hype for renewable energy such as hydropower and the invitation by the United States to many regional countries to get involved in the efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, Tajikistan is bringing back to the table the Rogun hydropower dam project. Rogun, conceived in Soviet days, was planned to generate 3,600 megawatts but the collapse of the Soviet Union halted the completion of this project. Now an independent country, Tajikistan, one of the poorest in the world, sees Rogun as a central element for its energy independence and a source of severely needed foreign currencies that could...

Energy: The government says wind power could supply the eastern half of the U.S. with a fifth of its electricity by 2024. Just don't try building wind farms where someone might see them. A claim is contained in a new study released by the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and technically it might be true. But we've heard these overblown predictions before, and experience around the world with heavily subsidized alternative energy has not worked out well. The area in question, called the Eastern Interconnection, is a grid extending roughly from the western borders of the Plains states through...

ROSCOE — A Bozeman company has filed applications with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for a preliminary permit to proceed with feasibility studies of hydropower projects on East and West Rosebud river. The application, submitted to FERC by Hydrodynamics Inc., describes one diversion dam on each river. The dam on the East Rosebud would be approximately 400 feet downstream of East Rosebud Lake. On the West Rosebud, the dam would divert water roughly 800 feet downstream of Emerald Lake. The proposed dams would be 8 feet high and 100 feet long. Both would involve taking some of the river’s runoff...

RIO DE JANEIRO — A massive power failure blacked out Brazil's two largest cities and other parts of Latin America's biggest nation for more than two hours late Tuesday, leaving millions of people in the dark after a huge hydroelectric dam suddenly went offline. Paraguay was also affected when the Itaipu dam straddling the two nations' border stopped producing 17,000 megawatts of power, resulting in outages in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and at least several other big Brazilian cities, Brazilian Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobao said. The cause of the failure had not been determined, but Lobao said...

The death toll from the catastrophic flood that engulfed Russia's biggest hydroelectric power station rose to 17 on Thursday but 58 people were still reported missing, officials said.

The ebbs and flows of wind powe stress the Northwest power gridIn the space of one hour last month, electricity generated at wind farms in the eastern end of the Columbia River Gorge shot up by 1,000 megawatts -- enough to power some 680,000 homes. Less than an hour later, it plummeted almost as much. Sitting in front of 10 computer screens in a fifth-floor room of the federal Bonneville Power Administration headquarters in Portland, Kim Randolph had to react quickly. Working from a keyboard, she diverted millions of gallons of water away from massive turbines spinning in Columbia River...

Utility wonks have been quipping for years that the future of energy in the Northwest is windy and gassy. When it comes to wind power, the future has already arrived, a reality that has come rushing home in the past two years and created major friction among the Bonneville Power Administration, wind power producers and the agency's utility customers. The BPA, which markets the energy produced at 31 hydroelectric dams and a nuclear plant in the Columbia River Basin, has seen the amount of wind power flowing onto its grid nearly double in each of the past four years. That...

Why he says they're wrong to view nuclear energy as 'evil'. Moore: 'Gas costs three times as much as nuclear, at least … Solar costs 10 times as much.' Patrick Moore is a critic of the environmental movement—an unlikely one at that. He was one of the cofounders of Greenpeace, and sailed into the Aleutian Islands on the organization's inaugural mission in 1971, to protest U.S. nuclear tests taking place there. After leading the group for 15 years he left abruptly, and, in a controversial reversal, has become an outspoken advocate of some of the environmental movement's most detested causes,...

GEORGETOWN, Colo. (AP) - Authorities believe smoke and fumes from a chemical fire likely killed five workers trapped in an underground pipeline at a hydroelectric plant in the Rockies, but the investigation into what went wrong continued Thursday. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the U.S. Chemical Safety Board are focusing on conditions inside the confined space and what type of protection and safety training the maintenance crew had, among other things, OSHA spokesman Rich Kulczewski said. The workers were identified as Donald Dejaynes, 43; Dupree Holt, 37; James St. Peters, 52; Gary Foster, 48; Anthony Aguirre, 18;...

THREE GORGES CONSTRUCTION SITE, Hubei Province, June 11 (Xinhua) -- Electricity generation now spans the two banks of China's largest hydropower project, the Three Gorges Project, with the first turbine generator on the right bank of the river going into operation on Monday after a 72-hour trial. The 700,000-kilowatt No. 22 turbine began producing electricity at 9:12 a.m. The electricity is transmitted through the state power grid to energy-strained eastern cities such as Shanghai. An electronic monitoring screen showed the turbine was operating normally with output of 650,000 kwh. The 14 turbines on the left bank of the Gorges...

GRANTS PASS, Ore. - A Pacific Northwest utility must build new fish ladders and take other steps to help salmon swim freely past four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River if it wants to renew its license to produce electricity, federal fisheries agencies said Tuesday. The cost of the ladders, turbine screens and fish bypasses was estimated at nearly $300 million. The high cost could boost pressure on the utility, PacifiCorp, to remove the dams altogether — something environmentalists have been pushing for. Removing the dams would open access to 350 miles of salmon spawning habitat that have been blocked...

President Bush said he would speed up his alternative-energy push during the remainder of his term with new spending focused on easing bottlenecks that are slowing the spread of ethanol in the market. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on a swing through Alabama, Mr. Bush said he is seeking ways to overcome difficulties in transporting the fuel, and to increase the number of stations selling it.

Will hydrogen from water soon run your car? By Tim Bradner Alaska Journal of Commerce Publication Date: 09/13/04 The concept is elegant and simple. Pull up to your neighborhood creek or tundra pond, and fill 'er up. Forget gasoline and diesel - hydrogen, extracted from good old H2O, is it. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. If we can figure out a way to economically extract hydrogen from water, we'll have an inexhaustible, pollution-free source of fuel. Our world is awash in water, quite literally. "When you burn hydrogen your emission is water vapor. You start with...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. There's more electrical power flowing from TVA's dams, and it's not just because it has been raining. The Tennessee Valley Authority is in the midst of a program to increase the amount of electricity produced at its hydroelectric dams by improving the turbines, electrical power generators and control rooms. The original goal of the modernization project that began in 1992 was to boost the electrical power output capacity of TVA's hydroelectric program by 240 megawatts. TVA officials have since revised that goal to 700 megawatts. The project is scheduled to be...

SPOKANE (AP) - Four dams on the Snake River continue to raise water temperatures to dangerously high levels for endangered salmon, an environmental group contends. The dams include Ice Harbor, which President Bush visited in late August to declare that federal efforts to restore salmon numbers were working. But the activist group American Rivers said Wednesday that even on the day of Bush's visit, the water temperature behind Ice Harbor Dam was 71 degrees, 3 degrees higher than the federal Clean Water Act standard of 68 degrees. ``Because of the lower Snake River dams, the water temperature in the river...

GRANTS PASS - Environmentalists plan a lawsuit to force PacifiCorp to install fish screens to protect endangered suckers in Upper Klamath Lake from being drawn into hydroelectric diversions. The Oregon Natural Resources Council has sent notice to PacifiCorp that it will file suit if the utility does not agree within 60 days to install fish screens on two diversion canals leading to powerhouses on Link River Dam, council attorney William Carpenter Jr. said Wednesday. The lawsuit would be filed in U.S. District Court in Medford. The group also notified Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who oversees the U.S. Fish & Wildlife...

I devote a great deal of time to bashing certain conservatives for their support of the Iraq war, so now in celebration of A Cry for Help's becoming A Fair and Balanced Cry for Help, I'm going to balance things out a bit by taking aim at the Left. Widespread power outages are also being reported in Detroit, Cleveland and Toledo, as well as in Toronto, Ottawa and throughout Ontario (The Agonist) The Northeast USA (and Ontario, Canada) went dark the other day when a power station in New York state gave up the ghost; knocking out a significant chunk...