Caps

Cabinet officials and leading senators Monday said they will continue to put the pressure of the federal government on BP plc until it caps the oil leak, cleans up the waters off the southern coast of Louisiana and pays damage claims.

Chicago-area LDC Nicor Gas lifted Tuesday caps on deliveries into its system that had been in effect for weeks, saying storage injections at the Nicor Gas Hub would no longer be interrupted.

Chicago-area LDC Nicor Gas lifted Tuesday caps on deliveries into its system that had been in effect for weeks, saying storage injections at the Nicor Gas Hub would no longer be interrupted.

American Electric Power (AEP) CEO Michael Morris last Wednesday said that he doesn’t believe mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. are inevitable, at least in the near term. “I don’t think that there’s a consensus in the Senate that would take you to that place,” he told reporters at a Washington, DC, briefing sponsored by the Energy Daily and BP America.

With focus shifted away from last week’s diminutive storage withdrawal (80 Bcf) and onto forecasts for the coldest air thus far this winter, the natural gas futures market erupted higher Monday as sellers backed away from a steady stream of commercial short-covering and speculative buying. The February contract received the biggest boost in the market’s first trading session of the year, rallying 63.8 to close at $6.827. At 48,897 contracts, volume was extremely light for the session.

After enduring one of the worst years in its corporate history, Charlotte, NC-based Duke Energy reported it ended 2002 on a legal high note.

Democrats in the House of Representatives are gearing up to wage a fight this week that, if successful, would force consideration of energy price-cap legislation on to the House floor. The move by House Democrats stands in marked contrast to a recent decision by their counterparts in the Senate to hold off on similar legislation in the wake of a move by FERC last week to extend price controls on bulk electricity transactions to the entire western region.

The implementation of price-cap proposals intended to aid California’s beleaguered wholesale electricity markets could lead to a significant rise in the number of power outages in the state this summer by reducing available generating supplies, according to a new report issued by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Policy. It warned that a $150/MWh “hard cap,” which some Capitol Hill lawmakers had endorsed, could idle as much as 3,600 MW of natural gas-fired capacity in California, depending on the price of natural gas this summer.

The implementation of price-cap proposals intended to aid California’s beleaguered wholesale electricity markets could lead to a significant rise in the number of power outages in the state this summer by reducing available generating supplies, according to a new report issued by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Policy. It warned that a $150/MWh “hard cap,” which some Capitol Hill lawmakers had endorsed, could idle as much as 3,600 MW of natural gas-fired capacity in California, depending on the price of natural gas this summer.