California state regulators have approved a proposal allowing SanDiego Gas & Electric to build its own solar farms here and buy power from others who build them – up to 100MW. SDG&E would spend up to $100 million putting 26 megawatts photovoltaic cells on land and buildings it owns in San Diego and purchase three times as much power from local solar farms. To control costs to customers, the PUC is capping how much SDG&E can spend on the projects it builds, and it’s requiring the company request bids for the power it buys and choose the cheapest ones. The focus on this program is on facilities of 1 to 5 megawatts to be done in the county, and which won’t require new power lines like the controversial Sunrise Powerlink.

Duke Energy said Wednesday it might close seven coal-fired units at its Carolinas power plants within five years as environmental regulations intensify. Federal regulators are expected to stiffen limits on pollutants that form smog, acid rain and haze, Duke said in an annual planning document filed with the N.C. Utilities Commission. New rules for toxic mercury emissions and coal ash are also expected. Shutting down old units can be cheaper for utilities than refitting them with new pollution controls. Duke said it may retire by 2015 all coal-fired units for which it’s not economical to install sulfur-dioxide controls called scrubbers.

Siemens Canada Milton Avenue facility in Hamilton where Siemens manufactures gas turbines, was to close in April next year but the company has now agreed to extend its life through July. There’s also the promise of two months’ extra employment for a few workers kept on to close the factory down. Siemens announced in August it is looking for a place to open the new factory after winning a massive order from Samsung. The turbine blades are for machines that will generate 600 megawatts of wind energy for the Ontario market and is part of a package in which Samsung has agreed to develop 2,000 megawatts of wind power over the next six years.

Pristine Power Inc, a small Canadian green energy developer, sees its biggest growth opportunity in bioenergy in the timber-rich province of British Columbia. Despite being battered in the past over plans to generate electricity from waste wood, Pristine believes it has learned from its mistakes and now has the knowledge, technology and fuel-supply arrangements it needs to thrive. Pristine, a seven-year-old Calgary, Alberta-based company, already operates a waste heat facility and a natural gas power plant, and is also developing wind energy assets in Ontario. Pristine is one of 14 groups with project applications in British Columbia’s call for power supplied from biomass. BC Hydro, the provincial power utility is expected to name preferred bidders in mid-January 2011. The company won a 65 MW biomass contract in northern British Columbia in 2003, but not long after 12 nearby lumber mills shut down due to a price slump, cutting off Pristine’s fuel supply and halting the project.

Northland Power Income Fund announced that it has completed financing for its wholly-owned 260 megawatt North Battleford Energy Center project in Saskatchewan. The financing was provided by an international syndicate of 15 banks led by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the Bank of Montreal, and Union Bank. Northland has also negotiated a swap to fix the term loan rate over the entire 20 year duration of the project’s Power Purchase Agreement with SaskPower. Construction of the 260 megawatt, natural gas-fired baseload facility began in May 2010. Commercial operations are expected to begin in the summer of 2013. The facility is being built under an engineer, procure and construct contract by Kansas City based Kiewit Power Partners, and will use a GE 7FA gas turbine operating in combined-cycle mode.

A new government document on community wind farms could mislead municipalities such as Fredericton into spending tens of millions of dollars on a project that could end up losing money. The Department of Energy recently published a paper called New Brunswick Community Wind Projects – Getting to the Tipping Point, which includes a mock business plan based on NB Power paying 10 cents a kilowatt/hour plus an inflation factor for wind-generated electricity. The province wants to buy 75 megawatts of electricity from community-owned renewable energy projects eventually. But that business plan assumes a small wind farm would operate 34.8 per cent of the time but realistically it should be viewed as 30% which could have a drastic effect on such a project’s cash flow.

The Market Surveillance Administrator, Alberta’s electricity market watchdog, has levied a $655,000 penalty against a NorthPoint Energy – a Saskatchewan trading company, the largest fine laid by the MSA since deregulation a decade ago. The hefty charge was the sum of 332 fines against NorthPoint Energy, the trading arm of Saskatchewan Crown utility SaskPower, for breaking a rule around scheduling power sales across provincial boundaries. It comes 11 years after the administrator investigated similar rule bending between the now defunct and notorious Enron Corp. and PowerEx, the trading arm of B.C. Power. No electricity price spikes resulted from the 300-odd trades that happened between 2008 and 2009, or harm happened to the integrated power system – NorthPoint paid the fine immediately and instituted a number of changes as a result of the investigation. NothPoint misinterpreted the rule, rather than intentionally set about trying to undermine the system for financial gain.

Portland General Electric Inc. says state environmental regulators may be about to squander an historic opportunity to negotiate the early closure of Oregon’s only coal-fired power plant. The utility says it’s making a last-ditch effort next week, submitting a revised proposal to shut its 585MW Boardman plant in 2020. But if regulators reject it, as they did an earlier PGE proposal, the company says it intends to move forward with an existing plan to invest more than $500 million in new pollution controls at the plant and keep it running until at least 2040.

The Market Surveillance Administrator, Alberta’s electricity market watchdog, has levied a $655,000 penalty against NorthPoint Energy – a Saskatchewan trading company, the largest fine laid by the MSA since deregulation a decade ago. The hefty charge was the sum of 332 fines against NorthPoint Energy, the trading arm of Saskatchewan Crown utility SaskPower, for breaking a rule around scheduling power sales across provincial boundaries. It comes 11 years after the administrator investigated similar rule bending between the now defunct and notorious Enron Corp. and PowerEx, the trading arm of B.C. Power. No electricity price spikes resulted from the 300-odd trades that happened between 2008 and 2009, or harm happened to the integrated power system – NorthPoint paid the fine immediately and instituted a number of changes as a result of the investigation. NothPoint  misinterpreted the rule, rather than intentionally set about trying to undermine the system for financial gain. (Calgary Herald)

The Columbia Basin Trust intends to complete its mandate to develop hydroelectric facilities with a $900-million expansion of generating capacity on the Waneta Dam south of Trail, BC. The expansion involves building an additional 335-megawatt generating station on the Waneta Dam on the Pend d’Oreille River, just south of Trail. It is expected to take a little more than four years to build, would provide employment for 400 construction workers and inject some $200 million in direct wages into the region. The Waneta expansion is one of three potential hydroelectric developments, along with facilities at the Arrow Lakes and Brilliant dams, that the Columbia Basin Trust was endowed with when the provincial government created the trust in 1994 as a vehicle to mitigate damage caused in the region by damming of the Columbia River system in the early 1960s. Now Columbia Power and the Columbia Basin Trust have reached an agreement in principle with Fortis to jointly develop and share ownership of the project, with Fortis retaining 51 per cent of its equity and the trust taking the balance. The Waneta expansion’s power-sale agreement has to be approved by the B.C. Utilities Commission. Under the Waneta agreement, Fortis would buy an average of 234 megawatts worth of the project’s power generation.

Battle River#5 went offline at 16:45 yesterday…Several large proposed solar photovoltaic power plants in Central California are undergoing review by county agencies. Each would be much larger than the biggest existing photovoltaic power plants in the United States, but would be smaller than some proposed desert solar projects that would rely on an unrelated concentrating solar thermal technology. The release of San Luis Obispo County’s environmental report on SunPower Corp.’s proposed California Valley Solar Ranch opened a 45-day comment period on the recommendations. The project is one of the largest utility-scale solar proposals now undergoing a U.S. county approval process…The carbon dioxide emissions rate of NextEra Energy has fallen by a third over the past decade as a result of significant investments in low- and no-carbon power generation. From 2000 through 2009, NextEra Energy’s CO2 emissions rate declined from 985 pounds/MWh to 657 pounds/MWh. NextEra Energy has been one of the most profitable companies in the industry. In fact, the company had the highest total shareholder return of any U.S. electric power company over the five years ending Sept. 30, 2009, and outperformed the sector as a whole by 119 percentage points over the 10 years ending Dec. 31, 2009.