Electricity Grid News

Iran said on Sunday it would strike the energy and water systems of its Gulf neighbours in retaliation if U.S. President Donald Trump follows through with a threat to hit Iran's electricity grid in 48 hours, escalating the three-week-old war.The prospect of tit-for-tat strikes on civilian infrastructure could deepen the regional crisis and further rattle global markets when they reopen on Monday morning.Air raid sirens sounded across Israel from the early hours of Sunday, warning of incoming missiles from Iran…

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney signed an agreement with Alberta's premier on Thursday that rolls back certain climate rules to spur investment in energy production, while encouraging construction of a new oil pipeline to the West Coast.Under the agreement, the federal government will scrap a planned emissions cap on the oil and gas sector and drop rules on clean electricity in exchange for a commitment by Canada's top oil-producing province to strengthen industrial carbon…

MSC Cruises utilized shore power in New York for the first time when MSC Meraviglia connected to shore power at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.The connection allowed MSC Meraviglia to switch off her engines to eliminate emissions locally, as part of the City’s and MSC Cruises’ commitment to improving local air quality while the ship is in port.MSC Cruises has fitted shore power capability as standard on all new ships since 2017 and is working to retrofit other vessels in its fleet.

A powerful magnitude 8.8 earthquake off Russia's Far Eastern Kamchatka Peninsula triggered tsunami waves of up to 5 metres (16 feet) and sparked evacuation orders in Hawaii and across the Pacific on Wednesday.The shallow earthquake damaged buildings and injured several people in the remote Russian region, while much of Japan's eastern seaboard - devastated by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami in 2011 - was ordered to evacuate.In Hawaii, coastal residents were told to get to high ground or the fourth floor or above of buildings, and the U.S.

The port of Barcelona, Europe's busiest for cruise ships, will scale back its passenger terminal capacity by 2030 as the city tries to put the brakes on surging arrivals and address concerns about overtourism.The city hall and port authority agreed on Thursday to reduce the number of terminals to five from seven, lowering the port's capacity for simultaneously handling cruise ship passengers to 31,000 from 37,000 by the end of the decade.Barcelona recorded a 21% increase in cruise…

Two weeks after the successful load out, the steel topside for the Hollandse Kust (west Beta) substation platform is ready to leave the port of Hoboken near Antwerp in the Netherlands for its final North Sea destination.The topside is schedule to leave the Dutch port on May 17, on a floating pontoon via the Scheldt and the Western Scheldt towards the North Sea.As soon as Heerema Marine Contractors’ installation vessel Sleipnir has completed its current job in British waters, it…

TM Edison, a consortium of Belgian marine construction companies DEME and Jan De Nul, has installed the first two of a total 23 caissons in the Belgian North Sea, marking the start of construction for the Princess Elisabeth Island, the ‘world’s first’ artificial energy island.Caissons are concrete building blocks that form the outline of the future island. In a later phase, the interior will be filled with sand to build high-voltage infrastructure that will connect new offshore wind farms.TM Edison is carrying out the work on behalf of grid operator Elia Transmission Belgium (Elia).

The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania completed a switch from Russia's electricity grid to the EU's system on Sunday, severing Soviet-era ties amid heightened security after the suspected sabotage of several subsea cables and pipelines.European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hailed the move, years in the planning, as marking a new era of freedom for the region, in a speech at a ceremony in Vilnius alongside the leaders of the three countries and the Polish president."These chains of power lines linking you to hostile neighbours will be a thing of the past…

NATO will boost its presence in the Baltic Sea after the suspected sabotage this week of an undersea power cable and four internet lines, while alliance member Estonia launched a naval operation to guard a parallel electricity link. Finland on Thursday seized a ship carrying Russian oil on suspicion the vessel had caused an outage of the Estlink 2 undersea power cable linking it with Estonia and fibre optic lines, and on Friday said it had asked NATO for support.Baltic Sea nations are on high alert for acts of sabotage after a string of outages of power cables…

A Biden administration auction of offshore wind development rights in the Gulf of Maine drew $21.9 million in high bids for half of the eight areas offered, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said on Tuesday.Offshore wind developers Avangrid AGR.N and Invenergy each walked away with two leases following one round of bidding. They were among 14 companies that had been qualified to bid at the sale.Once developed, the lease areas have the potential to power more than 2.3 million homes…

A power outage in the Rotterdam port area in the Netherlands briefly interrupted operations at one of Europe's biggest oil refineries on Tuesday, the plant's operator BP said.Electricity grid operator TenneT said the problem was solved shortly after 1000 GMT.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced the start of construction on Sunrise Wind, a 924-megawatt offshore wind project developed by Orsted, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) said on Wednesday.The project will provide enough clean energy to power about 600,000 New York homes once completed in 2026, it said in a statement.The Sunrise Wind project, situated about 30 miles east of Montauk, New York, will have an approved transmission route connected…

Between January and April 2024, China’s electricity generation from renewables surged 12% year on year, significantly outpacing the 6% growth in generation from fossil fuels. While steam coal shipments to China rose 29% year on year, they are starting to feel the pressure from stronger renewables. Between March and April, the shipments fell 7% as electricity generation from fossil fuels only rose 1%,” said Filipe Gouveia, Shipping Analyst at BIMCO.So far in 2024, electricity generated from renewables in China accounted for 25% of the country’s electricity production.

The Biden administration on Tuesday unveiled a plan to sell offshore wind leases in waters off the coasts of Maine and Oregon later this year, saying projects in those regions could one day power a total of 6 million homes.The proposed sales are part of a five-year schedule of offshore wind auctions the Interior Department outlined last week. Putting wind turbines along every U.S. coastline is a cornerstone of President Joe Biden's agenda to decarbonize the electricity grid and combat climate change.In a statement…

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has set out plans to invest $4.75 million to establish a new national center of excellence to accelerate offshore wind deployment across the United States.The Academic Center for Reliability and Resilience of Offshore Wind (ARROW), led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst with approximately 40 partners, will focus on workforce development, targeted research, and partnerships and strategies to advance offshore wind development.As offshore…

Belgium-based offshore installation contractor Jan De Nul has signed the export cable contract with Ørsted for its 2.9 GW Hornsea 3 offshore wind farm in the U.K.Jan De Nul will be responsible for the seabed preparation, transport, installation and protection of 350 km of DC export cables connecting the wind farm to the U.K. electricity grid.For the installation and protection of the DC export cables, the company is going to deploy several vessels.Cable-laying vessels Isaac Newton and Connector will transport and install the cables…

Avangrid, a U.S.-based subsidiary of the Spanish renewable energy giant Iberdrola, on Monday shared a photo of the completed Vineyard Wind 1 offshore wind substation.This is the first offshore wind substation installed in the U.S. and will serve the country's first large-scale offshore wind farm - Vineyard Wind.DEME Offshore used its flagship vessel, Orion, to install the 3,000-ton Vineyard Wind 1 substation.The offshore substation serves to collect the generated electricity from 62 wind turbines and sends the power through an export cable and into the regional electricity grid.Once completed…

Offshore installation firm DEME Offshore said Tuesday it had installed the approximately 3,000 ton offshore substation for the Vineyard Wind 1 project - the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the United States."The installation of the offshore substation, a first in the US, took place after months of preparation with collaboration and dedication of all partners involved in the construction of the Vineyard Wind offshore wind project, including skilled union labor from the Massachusetts Building Trades…

South Africa has granted Turkey's Karpowership access to the three ports of Ngqura, Durban and Saldanha Bay for a period of 20 years, the transport ministry said on Thursday, as it tries to find solutions to the country's power crisis.Karpowership aims to generate power on its floating gas ships and distribute it through South Africa's electricity grid. The plan received a boost from President Cyril Ramaphosa last week after he told lawmakers the ships would help ease the prolonged…

Corvus Energy on Thursday announced it will supply shoreside battery energy storage systems (ESS) for Crowley's eWolf, the first zero-emission, all-electric tugboat being built for operations in the U.S.The system will consist of two Corvus Orca BOBs—the containerized version of the Corvus Orca ESS—used for charging the vessel shoreside from when it enters service in San Diego’s harbor in 2023.Corvus Energy is also supplying the 6.2 MWh Corvus Orca ESS on board eWolf, which is currently under construction at Master Boat Builders…

Interferry CEO Mike Corrigan explains the driving forces behind the global trade association’s imperative to keep its foot on the gas.Interferry and its members scaled some demanding peaks in 2022 but, to state the obvious, our work is never done. Facing an equally busy schedule of challenges and opportunities in the year ahead, we need to keep climbing – a truism that has been memorably expressed as ‘the top of one mountain is always the bottom of another’.Our 46th annual conference in Seattle last October was definitely one of the peaks…

“Over the next ten years, from 2023 to 2032, more than 15,000 ships with deadweight capacity of more than 600 million tonnes are expected to be recycled, more than twice the amount recycled in the previous ten years,” says Niels Rasmussen, Chief Shipping Analyst at BIMCO.As recycling volumes increase, it is increasingly important that the Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships is ratified and implemented. The Convention was adopted in 2009 with the aim of reducing risks to human health…

Belgium's transmission operator, Elia, has presented its draft plans for what is expected to be the world’s first artificial energy island. The energy island, called the Princess Elisabeth Island, will be located almost 45 km off the Belgian coast and will serve as the link between the offshore wind farms in the second offshore wind zone (which will have a maximum capacity of 3.5 GW) and its onshore high-voltage grid. Elia, which presented the plans in the presence of federal ministers Tinne Van der Straeten (Energy) and Vincent Van Quickenborne (North Sea)…