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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

TVA Sued for Smoking Up the Great Smokies

LCG, Oct. 4, 2000The National Parks Conservation Association has filed a lawsuit against the Tennessee Valley Authority, charging that the taxpayer-owned electric utility is making the Great Smoky Mountains National Park smokier than it ought to be, the Environmental News Service reported yesterday.

In a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Knoxville, Tenn., the conservation association says TVA has exceeded Clean Air Act limits for opacity, a measurement of the density of smokestack pollutants, at its 1,400 Kingston and 712 megawatt John Sevier power plants.

Kingston burns about 3.8 million tons of coal per year and John Sevier more than two million tons, ENS said. And they are not even TVA's dirtiest coal-burners. The federal agency's Chattanooga plant puts out more oxides of nitrogen than any other U.S. industrial facility while its Cumberland City facility leads the way in emitting sulphur dioxide.

No one is quite sure how TVA, which was created in the 1930s to harness the Tennessee River, got into coal-fired power plants or nuclear plants, for that matter.

The lawsuit seeks a court order requiring TVA to comply with established air pollution emission limits, ENS said, and to pay civil penalties to the federal government for opacity violations for the past five years.

"People like to think of the Smokies as a pristine natural environment," said Tom Kiernan, NPCA president. "In fact, it's among the most polluted national parks in America. TVA is a federal agency and a major source of that air pollution, and we want the agency to do much, much more to protect the park."

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