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Wärtsilä to Supply the Engineering and Equipment to East Kentucky Power Cooperative for 217-MW Power Plant

LCG, August 27, 2025--Wärtsilä Energy announced yesterday an agreement with East Kentucky Power Cooperative (EKPC) to supply the engineering and equipment for a 217-MW power plant to be constructed in Liberty, Kentucky. The Wärtsilä equipment is scheduled for delivery in mid-2027, and the plant is expected to be commissioned in early 2028.

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TerraPower, Utah's Office of Energy Development, and Flagship Companies Sign MOU to Identify Sites for Advanced Nuclear Reactors

LCG, August 25, 2025--The Utah Office of Energy Development (OED), TerraPower and Flagship Companies announced today the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to explore the potential siting of a Natrium® nuclear reactor and energy storage plant in Utah. The MOU establishes a shared commitment to support advanced nuclear technologies to build Utah’s energy future and to prioritize reliability, economic growth and energy abundance.

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Industry News

Report Says California Bought Too Much Power

LCG, Aug. 13, 2001--When California sold surplus power at a loss of $46 million in July, eyebrows were raised, and if a report in Saturday's Los Angeles Times is on the money, entire foreheads may disappear.

According to the newspaper's analysis of the state's electricity purchases and projections of demand for power, the losses could add up to $500 million in the year ahead and be even higher farther into the future.

In pursuing what some critics have called a long-term fix for a short-term problem, the administration of Gov. Gray Davis has signed contracts with power producers for up to 20 years, committing the state to about $40 billion in power purchases, mostly over the next 10 years. The contracts were seen as necessary to protect the state against soaring wholesale power prices which resulted from an insufficiency of supply to meet growing demand.

Though the state's population had grown by 4 million during the 1990s, no new power plants had been built to provide electricity for those people or the businesses that employed and served them. The law of supply and demand guaranteed that power prices would soar in a free market.

But the advent of a free market for wholesale electricity, spawned in 1966 by passage of California's electric industry restructuring law, brought with it a rash of applications by private businesses to build so-called "merchant" power plants -- plants that would sell their output to the highest bidder. By 1998, the year that quasi-deregulation came to the state's electric industry, there were plans for more than 10,000 megawatts of new generation, a 20 percent increase in the state's capacity.

The new plants represented by those plans were mired in tedious and lengthy permitting processes before the California Energy Commission, which licenses power plants in the state, but when Davis at last became aware of the power shortage he issued orders to speed up the process. The result has been that new sources of generation began producing power this spring and more new plants come on line every week.

Add to that improvements in efficiency at older plants, once owned by the state's investor-owned utilities but purchased from them by other energy companies as a result of the restructuring law, and the state is moving rapidly toward a surplus of generation capacity.

The Times sees the oversupply problem reaching full flower in 2004, a year for which the state has purchased 43 percent of the expected demand of the three big utilities. The utilities think the state will need to furnish only about 35 percent of their demand.

Davis' spokeswoman, Hilary McLean, defended the purchases. "Locking in the power surplus was done on purpose," she said. "California was faced with the very strong and real possibility of blackouts."

But the blackouts haven't come, partly as a result of new power plants coming on line, partly because the older plants are repaired and operating better and mostly because it has been an uncommonly cool summer so far in California.

What no one in a position of authority has admitted is that almost no one in the industry really knows what to do about a free wholesale power market, but one insider came close.

"We are all on this huge learning curve for electricity markets," Doug Larson, executive director of the Western Interstate Energy Board, told the Times. "We have never gone from a shortage to a surplus in an environment where market forces set the prices."

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