SONGS

The Fortnightly 40 Best Energy Companies

A reshuffling of the rankings. Is nuclear the cause?

Of the top ten movers in this year’s Fortnightly 40, seven utilities rose in the rankings and three went down. But the utilities moving the most from 2013 to 2014 went down hard.

Is Nuclear Energy Still Viable?

Cheap natural gas is not just hurting coal. It’s doing the same to nuclear.

As the nation strives for cleaner air and less carbon emissions, nuclear – the most promising carbon-free power source – faces stiff competition from natural gas, which is cheap, abundant, and a lot easier to get permitted and built than a conventional reactor.

SCE Serves Formal Notice of Dispute to Mitsubishi over Defective Steam Generators at SONGS

Southern California Edison (SCE) served a formal notice of dispute on Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and Mitsubishi Nuclear Energy Systems (together, Mitsubishi) which seeks to hold Mitsubishi accountable for designing and manufacturing defective replacement steam generators (RSGs) at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS). Although Mitsubishi warranted the generators would operate reliably for 20 years, SCE was required to take SONGS offline in January 2012 when one of the Mitsubishi RSGs experienced a radioactive coolant leak after less than a year of operation.

CPUC Revises DSM Programs on Extended SONGS Outage

The California Public Utilities Commission has approved a series of revisions to the demand-side management (DSM) programs administered by San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) and Southern California Edison (SCE). The authorized changes are aimed at increasing DSM contributions to help the utilities mitigate the effects of ongoing outages at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS).

Vendor Neutral

Panda Energy awards turnkey $300 million turnkey contract to Siemens and Bechtel; Dominion starts up 585-MW CFB plant; Ocean Power Technologies and Lockheed Martin partner on wave power project; Infigen awards wind turbine service contract to Mitsubishi; ITC commissions 345-kV line in Oklahoma; ABB tests world’s biggest DC transformer; Xcel gets green light for Tres Amigas-area transmission upgrades; plus contracts and announcements from Elster, Sensus, Enertech, and others.

Orchestrating Outages

IT systems ease the pain of power plant restarts.

Squeezing plant outage duration by days or even weeks can save the industry billions of dollars in lost running time. The San Onofre outage is just the most visible example of what’s at stake for the industry. New outage management technologies and processes allow generators to coordinate outages and get critical plants back online quickly and efficiently.