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One of the country's largest coal utilities will begin closing power plants next month in four states, as strict federal environmental regulations begin to kick in. The company, American Electric Power, made the announcement in a notice advising employees at the electricity stations that it plans to close six power plants in Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana, according to news reports. The company said it plans to shutter as much as 6,000 megawatts of power plant capacity in seven states by the start of 2016. The closures were planned as far back as 2011 to comply with new pollution...

China’s Communist Party is gambling that this year’s tap on the brakes has been just enough to curb the housing boom and stop inflation pushing up to danger levels, but not enough to tip the economy into a hard-landing. The great hope is that Goldilocks growth can be kept on track to ensure an orderly transition of power in October 2012, when a new generation of leaders takes charge of the 1.3bn strong nation for the first time in a decade. The front-runner for General Secretary appears to be Xi Jinping, China’s "Redder than Red" mystery man. With public debt...

Major utility announces proposal to retire power plants, layoff workers and spend billions to comply with 'pending' regulations. It is no longer a secret that President Obama's administration is willing to allow electricity prices to "necessarily skyrocket," in order to accomplish his green energy agenda. Although he has so far been unsuccessful at instituting cap-and-trade, Obama's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hard at work running coal companies and consumers into the ground. Not that you'd know it from ABC, NBC and CBS news coverage. According to Paul Bedard's June 8 Washington Whispers column in US News & World Report, "two...

Let’s face it. Obama doesn’t give a damn about creating jobs. He only cares about fundamentally changing America and destroying its wealth. American Electric Power announced this week that the latest Obama EPA regulations will cost the company at least 600 jobs and over $6 billion which will be pushed on consumers. Today, Barack Obama’s horrible EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson lashed out at utility companies for revealing the economic destruction of her department’s policies. She then claimed her administration’s policies will prevent premature deaths… What garbage. The Hill reported: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson struck back Wednesday at American...

ObamaÂ’s EPA Getting it Done: AEP Closing 5 Coal Fired Plants June 10th, 2011 Obama said before the 2008 election that the price of electricity would necessarily skyrocket under his cap and trade plan. He said America must go this route because global warming was going to do us in and coal is just so dirty.YouÂ’ll probably remember this: Obama: My Plan Makes Electricity Rates Skyrocket So there you have the socialist Obama admitting what his plan was but somebody threw a wrench in the works. The Democrats couldnÂ’t get ObamaÂ’s cap and trade through congress. Obama wasnÂ’t fazed and...

American Electric Power on Thursday announced it plans to shut down several coal-fired power plants, convert or retrofit others, and cut as many as 600 jobs in the next few years to comply with regulations proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Based on the proposed regulations, AEP will have to retire nearly 6,000 megawatts of coalfueled power generation; upgrade or install new advanced emissions reduction equipment on another 10,100 megawatts; refuel 1,070 megawatts of coal generation as 932 megawatts of natural gas capacity; and build 1,220 megawatts of natural gas-fueled generation.

In a setback for environmentalists, the Supreme Court signaled that it would throw out a huge global-warming lawsuit brought by California and five other states that seeks limits on carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants in the South and Midwest. Encouraged by the Obama administration's top courtroom lawyer, the justices said the problem of regulating greenhouse gases should be left to the Environmental Protection Agency. It is too complex and unwieldy to be handled by a single federal judge acting on a "public nuisance" lawsuit, some of them said. A defeat for the lawsuit would put more pressure on the...

Japan is in imminent danger of a credit-crunch with global implications unless the authorities stabilise Tokyo's stockmarket and take overwhelming action to stop the yen exploding to record levels. Akito Fukanaga from RBS warned of a "financial shock" as banks and insurers comes under strain, and investors focus on the nexus of structured products linked to the yen. "Preventive measures on the financial front are urgently needed. Sentiment has declined severely and there are concerns over capital erosion at financial institutions. Lower stock prices and yen appreciation are on the verge of triggering a credit crunch," he said. The yen's...

"The diversity of the Northland area is why the conglomeration of neighborhoods was chosen for an AEP Ohio demonstration project that calls for the installation of 110,000 "smart meters." The meters not only enable the company to bill customers for their power usage, but could allow customers to control the amount of their bill. An AEP customer service representative gave a presentation on the "gridSMART" project at last week's meeting of the Northland Community Council. Virtually all of the Northland area was included in the pilot program that covers 150 square miles and encompasses parts of Columbus, Gahanna, Whitehall, Bexley,...

Residential customers aren't the only ones stung by a string of electricity rate increases. A year ago the steel mill faced a problem businesses love -- its Roanoke plant scrambled to match production with red-hot demand. "We were going great guns right through September of last year," said Joe Crawford, vice president and general manager of Steel Dynamics Roanoke Bar Division, formerly known as Roanoke Electric Steel. "And then October hit." The minimill melts scrap metal in electric-arc furnaces and thus depends heavily on electricity. For months now, it has operated at about 50 percent capacity and tried to cut...

The price of coal and efforts to control its emissions keep energy costs spiraling higher. American Electric Power, parent of Appalachian Power Co., reports that it is "the largest purchaser of coal in the Western Hemisphere." For Appalachian, coal-fired power plants generate about 98 percent of the electricity it delivers to customers in a territory that includes portions of Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee. For AEP companywide, coal fuels about 70 percent of power generation. And all that coal, an increasingly controversial fuel, helps explain the upward spiral of Appalachian's costs for complying with environmental regulations. Appalachian and AEP report...

Al Gore’s campaign against global warming is shifting into high gear. Reporters and commentators follow his every move and bombard the public with notice of his activities and opinions. But while the mainstream media promote his ideas about the state of planet Earth, they are mostly silent about the dramatic impact his economic proposals would have on America. And journalists routinely ignore evidence that he may personally benefit from his programs. Would the romance fizzle if Gore’s followers realized how much their man stands to gain? Earlier this year Gore experienced a notable public relations debacle. The Tennessee Center for...

IMAGINE if the nation's transportation infrastructure had been designed to serve only small regions, with wheat from Iowa easily reaching bakeries in Des Moines but not New York or computer products from the Silicon Valley easily reaching stores in Los Angeles but not Chicago. Costs of goods would vary widely among regions, and the economy would suffer.  Welcome to the world of electricity, where separate transmission systems - the "transportation" infrastructure of electricity - built by local utilities for local customers now serve as a national network.While not a "third-world transmission system," as some said after the huge East Coast...

The United States faces a severe credit crunch as mounting losses on risky forms of debt catch up with the banks and force them to curb lending and call in existing loans, according to a report by Lombard Street Research. Bear Stearns headquarters: Banks 'set to call in a swathe of loans' Bear Stearns headquarters in New York The group said the fast-moving crisis at two Bear Stearns hedge funds had exposed the underlying rot in the US sub-prime mortgage market, and the vast nexus of collateralised debt obligations known as CDOs. "Excess liquidity in the global system will be...

If you have funds across the Channel, or a ferme in Acquitaine, be vigilant. Keep a close eye on Europe's press, because you might one day find your money is nailed more immovably to its Continental home than you had thought. Four years ago, a small "cellule" inside the European Commission was ordered to draft a report, instigated by Paris, examining the legal basis under EU treaty law for 1970s-style exchange controls. It concluded that Brussels may lawfully freeze capital flows in and out of the EU, and within it, and that this could be done by a "qualified...

The dollar tumbled to a near a 15-year low against sterling yesterday on fresh signs of economic trouble in the United States. An 8.3pc crash in US industrial orders and an admission by the Federal Reserve chairman that Washington does not know how bad housing really is set off another day of wild gyrations on the currency markets. US house prices fell 3.5pc to an average $221,000, the third month of declines. Stocks of unsold homes rose to 7.4 months' supply, the highest since 1993. The US consumer confidence index fell sharply to 102.9. The "truckers index" of tonnage shipped...

HILLARY'S SECRET WAR The real story behindthe Clinton body count Posted: July 13, 20051:00 a.m. Eastern Editor's note: The following is an eye-opening look into New York Times best-selling author Richard Poe's revealing book, "Hillary's Secret War." Whereas Edward Klein's book on the New York senator reveals previously unknown aspects of her personal life, Poe's expose focuses on how Hillary Clinton and the left's "shadow government" have labored to put her and her far-left agenda in the White House by controlling the still-uncensored flow of real news to Americans – via the Internet.If that sounds too fantastic to be...

CHICAGO, Dec 21 (Reuters) - A rare and sometimes deadly pneumonia has hit 18 U.S. soldiers deployed in Iraq, and Army medical investigators are at a loss to explain the cause, according to a study published on Tuesday. In a report appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center said two of the soldiers had died from the rare illness, called acute eosinophilic pneumonia, or AEP. No common source was found for the outbreak that occurred between March 2003 and March 2004 among the soldiers in Iraq. The study covered only...

...The Kyoto idea is 10 years old now, and no better for its age. The U.S. wisely chose to forgo the pact, as the long- term costs add up to hundreds of billions a year across the world economy, not to mention untold lost economic opportunities. The energy industry has heretofore backed this U.S. decision, noting that even Kyoto's defenders have admitted the pact wouldn't slow climate change.... What's changed the industry's tune at the broadest level may be the Bush Administration's Clear Skies program, a smart pollution-reduction proposal that may pass Congress next year. That program, about to be...

WASHINGTON, April 18 — A nuclear reactor in Texas is leaking cooling water from the bottom of its giant reactor vessel, a development that experts view with concern because they have never seen it before, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said today. Technicians at the South Texas Nuclear Project, about 90 miles southwest of Houston, have found residues indicating that cooling water leaked from the vessel through two penetrations where instruments are inserted into the core, according to the company that operates the plant. Operators at all 103 commercial nuclear reactors have been giving closer attention to their reactor vessels since...