Utility News

MarketWatch:

 

Even though stock mutual funds investing in utilities are on a four-year roll, they refuse to quit.

Utilities led all other fund categories in the first quarter, up 7.6% as of March 28, according to preliminary data from fund-tracker Lipper Inc. And that includes stocks and bonds, U.S. and international. Only natural resources funds came close, up 5.8%.

“We’re not expecting some of the giant returns [from utilities] we’ve been seeing in past years,” Anthony Welch, chief investment officer at money manager Sarasota Capital Strategies Inc., said. “But they should return in the high single digits this year.”

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The Washington Post:

The government yesterday awarded AT&T, Qwest Communications International and Verizon the largest telecommunications contract in history, leaving Sprint Nextel out of a deal worth up to $48 billion over the next 10 years.

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Wall Street Journal (subscription):

In three years of operation, a 1,500 MW coal plant will spew three million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — the prime source of the world’s carbon emissions. An identical nuclear reactor will produce only a few bundles of highly radioactive fuel rods that can be safely stored in a nearby storage pool. Yet coal currently pays for none of these environmental damages. A carbon tax of roughly $10 per ton would level the playing field and make nuclear power far more competitive.

The reason building nuclear plants has been expensive and time-consuming is because of exaggerated popular fears of the technology. The public is now coming around. Seventy percent now consider nuclear plants acceptable, meaning new plants will probably not become bogged down in endless court delays.

The only reasonable scenario for avoiding global warming is to substitute nuclear power for coal as our prime source of base-load electricity, supplementing it with wind and solar electricity for our spinning reserve and peaking-power needs.

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CNet.com:

Microgy, which makes and runs facilities that turn manure into natural gas, has started to ship gas from its Huckabay Ridge facility over pipelines.

Six of the eight digesters–large silos that effectively employ heat and microbes to transform the manure into gas–are up and running. When the facility is fully operational, it is expected to be capable of producing 650,000 million cubic feet of gas, or BTUs of heat, a year. That’s the equivalent of 4.6 million gallons of heating oil. (About 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas can produce 1 million BTUs.)

The gas is being bought by the Lower Colorado River Authority, which will also get carbon-trading credits in the transaction.

The shipment, which was delayed, marks another milestone in the pursuit of making alternative sources of energy more mainstream.

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NBC4.com:

A potentially dangerous situation is developing in Reston, Va.

Somehow, ammonia got into the water and officials said it has gotten into people’s eyes when they shower.

Initial reports said one child and two adults in the Fairfax area have had stinging in their eyes after taking showers.

The Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department issued a statement late Monday evening saying that they were aware of the ammonia smell and taste in the water. Officials said the situation is a result of repair work conducted earlier in the afternoon at the Potomac Water Treatment Facility.

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CNet.com:

A start-up says it’s devised a system to produce electricity from wind turbines even when there is no wind, taking on the major challenge of storing wind-generated power.

[General Compression’s] plan calls for sending highly compressed air down the tower and into underground storage, such as caves or depleted gas wells, or through pipelines. The pressurized air can be released when needed to power an electricity generator, even if wind is not spinning the turbine’s blades.

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Central Penn Business Journal:

Allentown-based PPL Corp. named David G. DeCampli president of PPL Electric Utilities, which serves much of the midstate. DeCampli replaces John Sipics, who retired Jan. 1. DeCampli previously led the utility’s day-to-day operations. He has also worked for Exelon Corp. in Chicago.

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USAToday:

With global warming a rising concern, some environmentalists are rethinking nuclear power because it emits zero greenhouse gases.

“You can’t just write nuclear off,” says Judi Greenwald, director of innovative solutions with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, an environmental research and advocacy group. “I think everybody feels you have to at least look again” at nuclear power.

That attitude is markedly different from the revulsion that environmental groups have directed toward nukes for most of the past three decades.

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Forbes:

U.S. Rep Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and U.S. Rep. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), leaders of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, have introduced a bill that would amend the landmark Energy Policy Act of 2005 to provide more funding for research and development on technologies to capture carbon from coal-fired power plants and store it in the earth…

The Bingaman/Domenici measure is significant because their joint sponsorship significantly increases the likelihood of its passage. In addition, the government’s apparent commitment to carbon sequestration projects–combined with the ever-present threat of increased regulation of emissions–could be a signal to industry to hop aboard the carbon capture bandwagon.

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AP via Forbes:

A U.S. Federal Appeals Court Friday denied McLeodUSA Inc.’s bid to overturn a Federal Communications Commission ruling that granted Qwest Communications International Inc. relief from sharing its network at a discount with smaller carriers…

McLeod appealed a December 2005 FCC decision giving Qwest substantial relief from having to share its network at deeply discounted prices with smaller carriers such as McLeod to allow them to compete with Qwest in the same market…

Smaller carriers like McLeod are facing more appeals by the larger former Bell companies, which are lodging regulatory relief requests with the FCC with increasing frequency. The Omaha case is seen by many in the industry as a test case for subsequent decisions.

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