A leading driver behind Mexico's rising natural gas consumption in recent years has been the substantial rise in the use of gas in the power sector, country analysis undertaken by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) finds.

Industry in southern Germany could curb their electricity consumption at times of peak demand by up to 480MW in the course of an hour if Demand-Side Management (DSM) mechanisms were to be widely implanted, according to study presented by energy think thank Agora in Berlin this week.

Commercial operations have begun three months ahead of schedule at the $900 million gas-fired 800MW Sentinel Energy Project near Desert Hot Springs, Riverside County, California. The plant is co-owned by Competitive Power Ventures (CPV), GE Energy Financial Services and Diamond Generating Corporation (DGC). The general contractor for the construction of the project was Gemma Power Systems California.

The EU's Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard has called on the European Council and Parliament to approve the proposed back-loading of 900 billion carbon emission allowances (EUAs) in emissions trading scheme (EU ETS). Back-loading would reduce the surplus of emissions in the ETS, and the subsequent rise in carbon prices would encourage power producers to favour gas over coal.

Fortum's €130million ($167million) waste-fired CHP plant has started this week in the city of Klaipeda, Lithuania. It is the first of its kind in the Baltics, one of four such plants planned for the Baltic and Nordic region.

The contribution of gas to the UK's power generation mix has plunged by 32 percent in 2012 from 2011 level, comprising 28 percent of total generation, mainly due to the relative low cost of coal compared to gas and cheap coal imports mainly from Russia, Columbia and the United States, the latest country analysis done by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows. The contribution of coal was 39 percent of UK's energy mix, rising by 32 percent.

GE has signed a frame agreement with Green Waste Energy (GWE) to supply its Jenbacher gas engines to power a series of Advanced Recycling and Energy Conversion (AREC) plants that GWE's development subsidiary Green Waste Energy Development (GWED) plans to build. Each Jenbacher engine will generate nearly 2MW of power using syngas produced at GWED's waste-gasification facilities.

Greece's METKA and General Electric have sealed a €92million ($118million) EPC contract with Société Algérienne de Production de l'Electricité (SPE) to build an open-cycle gas turbine (OCGT) plant with a capacity of 368MW at the country's physical gas hub Hassi R'mel.

The crux of renewable expansion lies in the choice of location: If installations were built at the sites in Europe that offer the highest power yields, some €45 billion of investment in renewables could be saved by 2030, a study carried out by Siemens together with the Technical University of Munich finds.

Billions of euros are being wasted every year as a result of "building and expanding renewable power sources in the wrong location" and as a result of "inefficiencies in worldwide energy systems and markets," Siemens board member and CEO, Dr. Michael Suess said when presenting the study in Brussels today.

Coincident summer peak electricity demand in 2013 for the Northeast Power Coordinating Council (NPCC) region – New England, New York, Ontario, Québec, and the Canadian Maritime Provinces – is forecast to be down 330MW over the previous year, due to the region's drive towards conservation, energy efficiency and demand side response, a recently released NPCC report shows.