Washington

Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) energized and brought into service a new 500-kV transmission line in southeastern Washington. The 38-mile, single-circuit line connects BPA's Central Ferry Substation near the Port of Central Ferry in Garfield County, Wash., to BPA's Lower Monumental Substation in Walla Walla County. The line increases the electrical capacity of BPA's transmission system in response to requests for transmission service in this area.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission set a June 2017 deadline for two of three Western U.S. operating nuclear power plants to conduct in-depth analyses of their updated earthquake risk. The NRC is requiring Columbia (Benton County, Wash.) and Diablo Canyon (Avila Beach, Calif.) to submit their detailed risk analysis by June 30, 2017. The NRC continues to examine information from Palo Verde (Wintersburg, Ariz.); if the agency concludes the plant needs the in-depth risk analysis it must complete the work by Dec. 31, 2020.

NextEra Energy Partners completed its previously announced agreement to acquire approximately 664 MW of operating renewable power generation assets from the sponsor, NextEra Energy Resources. The additional facilities include: Ashtabula Wind III, a 62.4-MW wind generating facility located in Barnes County, N.D.; Baldwin, a 102.4-MW wind generating facility located in Burleigh County, N.D.; Mammoth Plains, a 198.9-MW wind generating facility located in Dewey and Blaine Counties, Okla.; and Stateline, a 300-MW wind generating facility located on the border of

The U.S. Department of Energy authorized Bechtel to resume engineering work on a facility at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant--a facility that will treat some of the nation's liquid radioactive waste. The resumption comes after progress toward resolving technical matters for the High-Level Waste Vitrification Facility, where the most radioactive of the stored liquid will be processed. The government contracted Bechtel National to build the multi-facility complex at the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington.

The Energy Department announced more than $10 million for projects to improve the reliability and resiliency of the U.S. electric grid and facilitate quick and effective response to grid conditions. This investment which includes six projects across five states- California, Hawaii, Missouri, North Carolina and Washington - will help further the deployment of advanced software that works with synchrophasor technology to better detect quickly-changing grid conditions and improve grid reliability.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a 10-year pilot license to Public Utility District No. 1 Snohomish County for the proposed Admiralty Inlet Pilot Tidal Project to be located in the Puget Sound. The 600-kW Admiralty Inlet Project is an experimental project designed to determine whether commercial development of the tidal energy resources of Puget Sound is commercially viable. The license authorizes Public Utility District No. 1 to study, monitor, and evaluate the environmental, economic, and cultural effects of hydrokinetic energy.

Utility Partners of America (UPA) installed nearly 40,000 digital electric meters on behalf of Spokane, Washington-based Inland Power & Light (Inland P&L). UPA is providing complete installation services including a work order management system (WOMS), workflow development, a customer information system (CIS) interface and data and inventory management. The meters will provide Inland P&L with diagnostics that will help improve power quality, increase ways to optimize the electrical system and pinpoint outages.

Inland Power & Light (IPL) selected a Tantalus-Itron solution for public power to provide AMI and smart grid services for the approximately 39,000 members in its cooperative in eastern Washington and northern Idaho. The fully integrated TUNet platform will serve as the core foundation for IPL to deploy Itron meters to facilitate the use of advanced applications such as automated metering, interval meter data collection, prepay, and power quality management.