POWER Magazine

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has proposed a materials-licensing rule that would revise several regulatory handoffs outside the reactor license, including pilot fuel lines, spent fuel reprocessing, dry storage cask approvals, advanced-fuel storage definitions, construction timing, and reporting requirements for fuel-cycle and materials facilities. The proposed rule, Modernizing Materials Licensing, released June 18, seeks to [...]The post NRC Proposes Licensing Rewrite for Advanced Nuclear Fuel Infrastructure appeared first on POWER Magazine.

The International Hydropower Association (IHA) said global installed hydropower capacity reached 1,469 GW in 2025 after the addition of 28 GW of new capacity during the year, including a record 11.6 GW of pumped storage. Pumped storage capacity surpassed 200 GW globally for the first time.The post Pumped Storage Additions Lead Global Hydropower Growth appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Ore Energy, the Netherlands-based iron-air multi-day energy storage company, on June 22 announced an agreement with Budget Thuis, one of the largest Dutch energy suppliers, to deploy 1 GWh of iron-air long-duration energy storage (LDES).The post Ore Energy Will Deploy 1 GWh of Iron-Air Long-Duration Energy Storage in Europe appeared first on POWER Magazine.

The unique demands of floating offshore wind turbines require a blend of specialized coating systems engineered to help prevent corrosion and extend asset service life in some of the world's harshest environments.The post Blending Marine and Energy Technologies for Floating Offshore Wind appeared first on POWER Magazine.

The global hunt for clean, always-on power is intensifying. Data centers powering artificial intelligence (AI) are signing long-term energy contracts at extraordinary speed. Against this backdrop, geothermal energy-carbon-free and available around the clock-is attracting serious capital for the first time in a generation.The post Geothermal Has Its Own Ghawar Fields-Nobody Is Looking for Them Yet appeared first on POWER Magazine.

An independent developer of utility-scale nuclear power projects said it has an agreement with GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy for a nuclear power plant utilizing small modular reactors (SMRs). Elementl Power on June 18 said the facility, sited along the Ohio River about 100 miles southeast of Columbus, has a planned capacity of as much as 1.5 GW.The post Elementl Power Developing Ohio SMR Project with GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy appeared first on POWER Magazine.

REV Renewables (REV), an LS Power company and a developer, owner, and operator of renewable energy and energy storage projects, said the company marked a major milestone with the commissioning of its Tumbleweed Energy Storage facility in Kern County, California.The post REV Renewables, Community Choice Aggregators Bring Energy Storage Project Online appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Soltec has announced that it is now able to provide PFE-compliant certification for its U.S. SFOne and SF7 series 1P and 2P trackers, reinforcing the company's ability to support utility-scale solar projects in the U.S. under the new regulatory and market conditions.The post Soltec Touts PFE-Compliant Certification for Solar Trackers appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Valar Atomics has achieved self-sustaining criticality and completed zero-power testing at Ward 250, its Gen IV tri-structural isotropic (TRISO)-fueled modular high-temperature gas reactor (HTGR), at the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab in Emery County. The project is the second advanced reactor to go critical under the Department of Energy's (DOE's)Reactor Pilot Programand the first DOE-authorized [...]The post Valar Atomic's Ward 250 Becomes Second Reactor to Go Critical Under DOE Pilot Program appeared first on POWER Magazine.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has voted unanimously to issue tailored show-cause orders under Section 206 of the Federal Power Act to each of the six regional transmission organizations (RTOs) and independent system operators (ISOs) under its jurisdiction, directing them to either defend or reform tariff rules governing how data centers, manufacturing facilities, and [...]The post FERC Orders All Six Regional Grid Operators to Justify or Rewrite Large-Load Tariffs appeared first on POWER Magazine.

The steam turbine and generator package for Oklo's first Aurora powerhouse at Idaho National Laboratory (INL)-a pioneering application of a commercially established industrial turbine platform at the heart of a first-of-a-kind advanced reactor's conventional island-is in active production at Siemens Energy's facilities in Gorlitz and Erfurt, Germany. In details provided toPOWER, both companies confirmed the [...]The post In a First for Advanced Nuclear: Siemens Energy Turbine Package Advances for Oklo's Aurora-INL appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Meeting the increasingly important but complex needs of the energy industry requires not only excellent design and engineering, but also advanced sensor capabilities that extend beyond the limits of current technology. A piece of the solution for enhanced technology will come from quantum sensors, which leverage quantum mechanics to deliver tools that will push past [...]The post Quantum Sensor Ambitions: A New Horizon for Utility Innovation appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Energy giant GE Vernova said the company continues to advance electrification and decarbonization goals as it adds more generation capacity to global power grids. The company on June 17 released its 2025 Sustainability Report, highlighting its emphasis on bringing new innovation and breakthrough technologies to the power generation space.The post GE Vernova Highlights More Generation, Carbon Reductions, New Technologies in Sustainability Report appeared first on POWER Magazine.

A Connecticut-based developer of distributed energy resources said it has begun construction on solar power installations at four municipal landfill sites in that state.The post Verogy Starts Work on Solar Facilities at Municipal Landfills appeared first on POWER Magazine.

A $350 million Department of Energy (DOE) coal-revival program has put $18.5 million toward the TerraSpark Energy Campus, a 1.6-GW greenfield project in West Virginia pairing Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) supercritical boilers with Mantel Capture's molten borate carbon capture. In responses to POWER, developer TerraSpark laid out a 2030 startup target, a 95% to 98% [...]The post A New Coal Plant in the U.S.? Once Unthinkable, Now a Strong Maybe appeared first on POWER Magazine.

MiCo Co. Ltd. announced that its subsidiary, Hyundai Heavy Industries Power Systems Co. Ltd. (HPS), has signed a share purchase agreement (SPA) to acquire a 100% stake in Netherlands-based NEM Energy B.V. from Mutares SE & Co. KGaA, a German-listed investment firm. The transaction, which includes NEM Energy's German subsidiary NEM Balcke-Durr GmbH, is scheduled [...]The post MiCo Acquires Global HRSG Leader NEM Energy appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Elevate Infrastructure and ArcLight Capital Partners on June 11 announced the companies have begun operating the 150-MW/600-MWh Prospect Power battery energy storage project in Rockingham County, Virginia.The post Elevate, ArcLight Bring Energy Storage Facility Online in Virginia appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Technology giant Meta said it has expanded its partnership with major renewable energy developer RWE through a long-term corporate power purchase agreement (PPA) for the 298-MW Rabbit's Foot Solar installation in North Texas.The post Meta Announces PPA With RWE for 298-MW Texas Solar Power Project appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Cypress Creek Energy has announced financial close on the first two phases of the three-phase Steel River Energy Center in Arkansas. The company on June 11 said it secured $3.5 billion in financing for the project. Phase 1 and Phase 2 combined will feature 1.63 GW of solar power along with 1.9 GWh of battery energy storage.The post Cypress Creek Closes $3.5-Billion in Financing for Large Arkansas Solar+Storage Project appeared first on POWER Magazine.

A Colorado-based fusion energy company said the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) has approved the company's preconceptual technical design for its commercial fusion power plant.The post DOE Approves Xcimer Energy Fusion Power Plant Design appeared first on POWER Magazine.

A Texas-based power producer has broken ground on a new natural gas-fired power plant that is part of the state's plan to increase its supply of dispatchable electricity.The post Texas Utility Building New 570-MW Natural Gas-Fired Power Plant appeared first on POWER Magazine.

System planners and grid operators are treating extreme heat as an assumed operating condition given new pressures, including drought, demand growth, and fuel concerns. Will it be enough? For decades, the U.S. power system treated extreme heat as a tail risk, managed through seasonal readiness-something for which to prepare. But hotter conditions are now arriving [...]The post From Tail Risk to Design Baseline: How the Grid Is Adapting to Extreme Heat appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Wildfires are no longer isolated disasters limited to the western United States-they are a growing threat to communities, infrastructure, and electric grid reliability nationwide. For the 42 million Americans served by electric cooperatives, the risk is especially acute. Co-ops power more than half the nation's landmass, primarily in rural areas where wildfire danger is highest [...]The post Wildfire Risk Is Rising. Electric Cooperatives Are Acting-Congress Must Too appeared first on POWER Magazine.

As fire-weather risk expands beyond California, utilities are turning to sub-kilometer, asset-level forecasts to support public safety power shutoff decisions they can defend in front of regulators. When the National Weather Service (NWS) issued routine convective outlooks on the morning of May 27, 2025, public guidance for the Houston metro called for widespread 30 to [...]The post Advanced Weather Forecasting: How Sub-Kilometer Models Are Reshaping Utility Risk and Wildfire Decisions appeared first on POWER Magazine.

NextNav, a Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) company with a history of telecommunications mergers, requested a rule change that would allow it to build out a network of high-power broadband operations. The proposed rule would impact every U.S. electric utility.The post What Utilities Need to Know About the 900-MHz NextNav' FCC Proceeding appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Utilities, federal agencies, and the national labs have finally assembled the tools to harden the grid against an increasingly hostile environment. The question is whether they can put them together fast enough. When a line of storms tore across the Northeast in late April 2025, racing from Ohio into central Pennsylvania, meteorologists recognized the signature [...]The post How the Power Sector Is Bracing for a More Violent Climate appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Summer is the season utilities brace for. Demand peaks as air conditioners run flat out, equipment runs hot, and the workforce that keeps the grid alive does so under some of the year's most punishing conditions. The same months that strain transformers and conductors also strain the people climbing structures and pulling cable beneath them. [...]The post The Heat Is On: Summer Safety for Power Crews appeared first on POWER Magazine.

The power generation sector, including electric utilities and grid operators, recognizes the value of moving equipment underground to mitigate outages, lessen risks to assets, and reduce the chances of that equipment causing a wildfire.The post Growing Grid Strategy: Undergrounding Power Lines to Withstand Weather appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Companies are deploying a variety of strategies in efforts to strengthen the power grid against severe weather and other issues.The post Advanced Technologies Tackling Task of Grid Hardening appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Extreme weather is making one thing clear-hardening of the power grid alone is not enough to solve the problem of keeping the lights on.The post Building a Storm-Ready Grid: Why Operations Matter as Much as Infrastructure appeared first on POWER Magazine.

The power sector recognizes the urgent need to harden the power grid, which involves upgrading and fortifying electrical infrastructure to withstand severe weather, cyberattacks, and surging demand for electricity. The U.S. Dept. of Energy is providing billions of dollars to groups involved with modernizing the grid, underscoring the importance of measures designed to support power [...]The post The POWER Interview: Hardening Power Systems to Withstand Natural Disasters appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Electricity is no longer just energy-it is becoming infrastructure for intelligence. This shift means electricity customers, residential and industrial, will need to become active grid participants, while utilities learn to coordinate these millions of flexible devices as virtual power plants to effectively meet rising energy needs.The post From Powering Machines to Powering Intelligence-The New Age of Electricity appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Antares Nuclear Inc.'s Mark-0-a sodium heat-pipe-cooled microreactor fueled by high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) tri-structural isotropic (TRISO) fuel compacts-has achieved zero-power criticality at Idaho National Laboratory's (INL's) Reactor and Critical Experiment (RACE) facility, becoming the first advanced reactor to reach that milestone under the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Reactor Pilot Program. The development, announced on June [...]The post Antares Mark-0 Becomes First Advanced Nuclear Reactor to Achieve Criticality Under DOE Pilot Program appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) announced the company has published five peer-reviewed physics basis papers detailing its work on the group's ARC fusion power plant.The post CFS Publishes Papers Validating Physics of ARC Fusion Power Plant appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Google and Intersect, a clean energy developer Google acquired in March 2026, have launched construction on the Meitner Energy Center, a co-located data center and generation complex in the Texas Panhandle that will integrate more than 1 GW of wind, solar, and battery storage with on-site gas-fired generation for reliability firming. The project is located [...]The post Google Launches 1-GW-Plus Co-Located Data Center and Generation Complex in Texas Panhandle appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Fusion energy group Helion said the company has completed a $465-million Series G investment round, increasing the Everett, Washington-based group's valuation to $15.5 billion. Helion is among dozens of U.S. and global companies working to commercialize fusion power.The post Helion Announces $465-Million Funding Round to Support Fusion Energy appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the energy system: While the expansion of wind and solar power continues to progress across Europe, AI will ensure the efficient use of every generated kilowatt-hour. Intelligent algorithms that synchronize generation and consumption in real time will help stabilize grids, avoiding expensive curtailment. Software will become an important tool for [...]The post AI-Powered Grid Management: Reducing Renewable Electricity Curtailment appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Urenco USA, operator of the only U.S. commercial-scale uranium enrichment facility, will expand low-enriched uranium (LEU) capacity at its National Enrichment Facility (NEF) in Eunice, New Mexico, by nearly 50% through a privately funded, multibillion-dollar investment that includes construction of a new enrichment plant. The project will add 2.1 million separative work units (SWU) of [...]The post America's Only Commercial Uranium Enricher Is Privately Building a New Plant Amid a Widening Nuclear Fuel Supply Gap appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Colorado-headquartered Xcimer Energy has announced the start of operations for Phoenix, what the company calls the largest privately owned laser system in the world. Phoenix, named after the legendary bird from Greek and Egyptian mythology, is the company's prototype for commercializing laser fusion.The post Xcimer Energy Starts Operations of Prototype for Laser Fusion Architecture appeared first on POWER Magazine.

The Trump administration's unprecedented assault on wind energy development in the U.S. stands in sharp contrast to its promotion of oil and gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG) production, and microreactor nuclear projects. Agencies have blocked 165 wind projects nationwide while simultaneously spending nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds to convince energy companies to abandon offshore [...]The post Contrasting Trump's Campaign Against Wind Energy With Promotion of Oil and Gas, LNG, and Nuclear Projects appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Another U.S.-based energy company said its technology has achieved key performance metrics that advance its goal of commercial fusion by the mid 2030s. California-headquartered Pacific Fusion on June 2 said its core pulsed power technology is on track to achieve net facility gain by 2030. That's the state where the entire fusion machine produces more [...]The post Pacific Fusion Touts Funding, Technical Achievements on Way to Fusion Power appeared first on POWER Magazine.

According to the State of the Global Climate 2024 report released by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the continued rise in global temperatures is driving a measurable increase in both the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Among these, tropical cyclones, including hurricanes and typhoons, as well as extreme precipitation events, have emerged as [...]The post Design and Construction Planning of Solar Power Projects Under Extreme Weather Conditions appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Installed utility-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) is expected to cross the 100-GW milestone this year, and yet no two utility-scale BESS installations are exactly alike. A 4-hour, fully integrated AC block LFP shifting 100 MW of Kern County sunshine, a 1-hour tier-2 air-cooled NMC tied to a dusty 5kV pole somewhere in West Nowhere, [...]The post BESS Needs to Be the Most Reliable Cornerstone of the Modern Grid-Analytics Can Help appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Global clean energy group ContourGlobal announced the start of commercial operation of another utility-scale solar-plus-storage project in Chile, one the company said features Latin America's longest-duration battery energy storage system.The post ContourGlobal Brings Major Solar-Plus-Storage Project Online in Chile appeared first on POWER Magazine.

POET, a South Dakota-headquartered company and the world's largest producer of biofuels, has joined with Antora Energy to commission a 5-GWh, multi-day thermal energy storage system at POET's bioprocessing facility in Big Stone City, South Dakota. Antora is supplying batteries from the company's recently expanded San Jose, California gigafactory. The companies earlier in May said [...]The post Major Thermal Energy Storage Project Commissioned for South Dakota Biofuels Producer appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Sweden's nuclear reversal marked three major developments this past week, as advanced modular reactor developer Blykalla and long-established nuclear services firm Studsvik filed separate applications for up to 1.7 GW of new reactors at two sites, while the government formalized an unprecedented financial commitment to another flagship project. The filings, among the first in Sweden's [...]The post Blykalla, Studsvik File for Up to 1.7 GW of New Swedish Nuclear Capacity as Government Proposes $3.7B Capital Commitment to Ringhals SMR Project appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Uptime has become the defining performance metric of the modern datacenter. As digital servicesunderpin everything from financial markets totransportsystems, tolerance for disruption has all but disappeared. For mission-criticalenvironments, 99.999% availability and just five minutes of downtime per yeararen'tthe dream,but the baseline. Industry performance is improving. According to theUptime Institute's Annual Outage Analysis2025, datacenterservice availability has [...]The post Five-Nines Data Center Uptime Starts with Automation appeared first on POWER Magazine.

New Jersey-based Thea Energy, one of several U.S. companies working to commercialize fusion energy, said the company has raised $100 million in Series B funding. Thea is advancing stellarator technology to provide baseload fusion power. The company, which has several investors, is moving toward beginning construction of its Helios power plant (Figure 1) by the [...]The post Thea Energy Raises $100 Million in New Funding to Advance Fusion Technology appeared first on POWER Magazine.

DigitalBridge Group said it has a definitive agreement to acquire ArcLight Capital Partners as part of a $1.05-billion deal.The post DigitalBridge Acquiring ArcLight in $1-Billion Power Infrastructure Deal appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Florida-headquartered Spearmint Energy said it has closed a financing package of $450 million to support a standalone battery energy storage system (BESS) installation in Texas.The post Spearmint Energy Secures $450 Million in Financing for Texas BESS Project appeared first on POWER Magazine.