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Minnesota PUC Approves Operations Extension for Xcel Energy's Prairie Island Nuclear Plant

LCG, August 15, 2025--Xcel Energy announced that the company received state approval yesterday from the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to extend operations of the Prairie Island nuclear plant through the early 2050s. Prairie Island has two units that have a combined generating capacity of 1,100 MW. The units’ current operating licenses expire in 2033 and 2034.

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PGE Announces Addition of 475 MW of Battery Energy Storage Systems to Improve Grid Reliability and Costs

LCG, August 7, 2025--Portland General Electric (PGE) today announced the completion of three, four-hour lithium-ion utility-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) in Oregon, adding 475 MW and more than 1.9 GWh of dispatchable capacity to serve the Portland metro area. Each of these BESS facilities can deliver power during peak demand or when other electric generating facilities are limited, which improves system flexibility, reliability and costs.

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Industry News

Connections of Wind Farms to Irish Grid Blocked

LCG, Dec. 4, 2003--The intermittent nature of wind power production and the significant amount of planned growth of wind installations in Ireland has led a top regulator to halt further connections in order to insure reliable operations.

The decision was prompted in part by a letter to the regulator, Tom Reeves, from the managing director of ESB National Grid, Kieran O'Brien, in which O'Brien asked for emergency steps to be taken. "While these issues could be ignored with low levels of wind generation on the system, now that definitive plans are in place to significantly and rapidly increase the proportion of wind generation on the system, a number of complex technical issues relating to wind generation must be resolved," the letter stated.

Reeves said that he knew the decision would not be received well by executives of wind power production firms. He stated that he was "naturally reluctant to approve emergency type measures of this nature without any prior warning to the industry," but that a higher priority lay in "overall system reliability."

O'Brien asked that the technical issues should be fully researched before any new connections are approved. He wrote that the amount of currently connected facilities and approved wind connection agreements "pose an increased risk to the security and stability of the power system which the transmission system operator feels exceeds the level normally likely to be accepted by a prudent system operator."
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