Utility News

Chicago Tribune:

The former chief of Enron Corp.’s high-speed Internet unit, who turned government witness and testified in the trial of former Enron Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling and company founder Kenneth Lay, was sentenced to 27 months in prison Monday.

It has been nearly three years since Kenneth Rice, 48, pleaded guilty to securities fraud and agreed to help federal prosecutors on other cases related to the energy giant’s collapse. His sentencing was postponed as he cooperated with prosecutors.

Before sentencing, Rice apologized for his role in the corporate scandal.

No Comments »

The New York Times:

Even as a drought and unprecedented water restrictions strip many Florida lawns of their lushness, Mark Harding has few takers for the artificial grass he sells from a showroom here. Inquiries are up, he said, but swapping turf for less thirsty alternatives remains hard for Floridians to get their heads around.

“People are just starting to look at it,” said Mr. Harding, a transplant from Buffalo who admits to having replaced only a piece of his own lawn with the fake stuff. “It’s right in its infancy stage.”

The same might be said for awareness that Florida’s water supply, seemingly endless given the abundance of springs, lakes, canals, aquifers and rainfall, is not.

No Comments »

BusinessWeek:

Seven years ago the communications business, made up of companies providing everything from phones to computer networks to routers and switches, was laid low by the worst collapse to hit a U.S. industry since the Great Depression. With breathtaking speed and little advance warning, high-flying companies like Global Crossing Ltd. and WorldCom Inc., which had loaded up on debt to build out fiber-optic networks and buy up companies in anticipation of a never-ending e-commerce boom, collapsed into bankruptcy. Giants such as AT&T were ripped apart as they scrambled to recover from free-falling sales and profits. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs. Prices of some inflated stocks–boasting price-to-earnings ratios that topped 400 in the most extreme cases–tumbled 95% or more.

Investors saw some $2 trillion of market value vanish in a little more than two years–twice the damage caused by the parallel bursting of the Internet bubble. Amid the wreckage, some predicted it could take a decade or more before the industry would climb back and fill all those empty pipes that starry-eyed executives had buried beneath the earth and oceans.

Over the past year, however, the telecom industry has roared back to life. Credit a steady rise in appetite for broadband Internet connections, which enable easy consumption of watch-my-cat video clips, iPod music files, and such Web-inspired services as free Internet phoning.

No Comments »

AHN News:

An energy bill is stalled in the Senate where a plan by Democrats to require utilities to use more renewable forms of energy to generate electricity was met by Republican resistance. Democrats want about $13.7 billion in tax breaks to encourage energy practices that will reduce the nation’s dependence on non-renewable and foreign sources of energy.

Their tax break plan would reward the use of more clean energy, biofuels, fuel-efficient vehicles and simple energy conservation measures. But Democrats were forced to set aside their renewable energy plan until next week after they failed to gather the necessary 60 votes to avoid a Republican filibuster and continue on Thursday.

No Comments »

8th Circuit Court:

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has decided that calls from a land line to a cell phone placed and received within the same major trading area are local calls, subject to reciprocal compensation arrangement under the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The case is Alma Communications Co. v. Missouri Pub. Serv. Comm’n, No. 06-2401 (June 11, 2007).

No Comments »

Ticker Tech News:

A House energy bill set for a committee vote on Wednesday will worsen U.S. reliance on imported fuels and weaken efforts to improve the nation’s electricity delivery infrastructure, a group of energy-consuming organizations said today.

Titles I and II of the legislation, H.R. 2337, scheduled for a vote Wednesday in the House Resources Committee, would roll back key provisions in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that were designed specifically to expand U.S. production of oil and natural gas, while also strengthening the U.S. electric power transmission grid.

No Comments »

Forbes:

Calling Wall Street’s expectations too low for Embarq Corp., a UBS analyst upgraded the telecommunications company Thursday, sending shares higher amid gains for the broader market.

UBS analyst Gaurav Jaitly upgraded Embarq, which was spun off from Sprint Nextel Corp. a little over a year ago, to “Buy” from “Neutral” and raised his target price to $75 from $59.

No Comments »

York Daily Record (PA):

Gov. Ed Rendell has requested that the U.S. Department of Energy reconsider its draft of a national electric transmission corridor.

In April, the DOE proposed the creation of the Mid-Atlantic Area National Corridor that would include all of New Jersey and large sections of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware and Washington, D.C. The agency’s draft corridor covers 50 counties in Pennsylvania, including York County.

The goal of the proposed corridor would be to spark the construction of new power lines that would help relieve transmission congestion problems in those areas.

In a June 8 letter to Samuel W. Bodman, secretary of the DOE, Rendell said the corridor’s broad size does not take into account specific routes of pro- posed power lines needed to satisfy national congestion demands.

No Comments »

Lancaster Online (PA):

PPL Corp. said today it might someday want to form a joint venture to build a third nuclear reactor at its Susquehanna power plant near Berwick, Luzerne County.

To keep that option open, PPL has told the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that it intends to apply for a combined construction and operating license for a third unit.

Just going through the licensing phase would cost PPL an estimated $70 million.

But a decision on whether to actually build that reactor could be as long as four years away, the energy company said.

No Comments »

WDBJ7:

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) - Allegheny Energy now wants a rate increase for the West Virginia piece of a proposed 240-mile interstate transmission line that will also run through part of Virginia.

Spokesman Allen Staggers says Allegheny filed for a 1.3% rate hike last week because of a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission decision. Allegheny didn’t initially seek an increase when it asked the state Public Service Commission last March to approve the West Virginia portion of the transmission line.

Staggers says the federal commission has since reconsidered how to allocate construction costs for the $1.3 billion transmission line. Staggers says that prompted Allegheny to seek the rate increase.

No Comments »