UK Chancellor George Osborne has granted tax breaks to shale gas developers of more than half the amount they pay on profits, in an effort to kick-start shale gas drilling to boost Britain's domestic supply of gas for power generation.
In an effort to curb energy bills, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is using Kitakyushu City as a test bed for a hydrogen storage system integrated with controller software, solar panels and industrial CHP (Combined Heat and Power) backup. The City of Yokohama, Toyota City, and Keihanna are also part of the Japan Smart City Portal experiment, which began in 2010 and ends in 2014.
Slashing the financing granted for coal-fired power projects is part of the World Bank's new energy strategy. "Only in rare circumstances" will the bank support new greenfield coal power generation projects, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said, while the help for natural gas projects will be scaled up.
ABB has won an order worth $30 million from Zagros Energy to build four substations in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, as part of an initiative to strengthen the reliability of the regional power grid. The project is scheduled for completion in 2014.
Wood Group GTS has completed a maintenance contract worth $2 million for Frame 5 and 6B gas turbines at power stations in Costa Rica and the US.
The UK Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has published a draft delivery plan for Contract for Differences (CfDs) and the reliability standard of the future Capacity Market to guide how much capacity is auctioned in 2014 for delivery in 2018 to 2019.
Swiss-based operator KTG has selected China's EPC Sepco III Electric Power Construction Corp as the winning bidder to build a 390MW gas-fired combined cycle cogeneration plant in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina.Sepco III was chosen as it offered the lowest price in the tender, bidding to carry out project at a cost 218 million euro ($284.44 million).
Energos, a supplier of small-scale waste to energy plants, has received permission from the Environmental Ministry in Northern Ireland to build a waste to heat CHP facility in Lisburn, Ireland. Construction is scheduled to start in 2014 at a gasification facility as part of AmeyCespa's Milton Keynes Waste Recovery Park.
Royal Dutch Shell's Nigerian business unit SPDC has halted operations of the Afam VI power plant (624MW) over a gas shortage due to the closure of the Trans Niger Pipeline.
British consumers will be hit with rising energy bills as utilities are passing on the costs for power grid updates allowing greater volumes of intermittent renewable energy, warned RWE Npower, one of the UK's Big Six power producers.
With about 10 GW of offshore wind power expected to come on the system in the UK by 2020, balancing the additional intermittent capacity, mostly through gas-fired plants, will "not pose a major challenge," Dong Energy's UK country manager, Benji Sykes said in an evening debate in Westminster on 'Cutting the costs of Carbon'.
Consumers Energy, Michigan's largest utility, has filed for approval to build a 700MW combined cycle gas-turbine (CCGT) plant in Flint at a cost of $750 million to replace coal-fired capacity that is up for retirement by 2017.