Governors' Wind Energy Coalition

New federal policies are needed to help the country’s vast, aging electric grid ward off cyber attacks and handle a surge of electric cars and renewable power during the next two decades, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said today.

The $1.8 billion agreement yesterday by New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. to sell 15,700 miles of high-voltage lines to ITC Holdings Corp. would double the size of ITC, the nation’s largest independent transmission owner, and mark a new milestone for advocates of wide-open electricity competition.

Unless a set of tax perks, credits and other goodies worth billions to industry gets slipped into a bill this month, they’ll expire — and lobbyists for a variety of interests are working hard to keep them alive.

The Interior Department today asked the public to suggest ways it should offer hundreds of square miles of water off mid-Atlantic states for offshore wind projects.

An EWEA report said the increased electricity will also generate a surge of new jobs — close to 300,000 in the EU offshore wind power sector by 2030.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning jumped by the largest amount on record last year, upending the notion that the brief decline during the recession might persist through the recovery.

With just a month to go before it is set to expire, congressional supporters of a Treasury Department renewable energy grant program have started lobbying their colleagues to keep the effort alive for one more year.

Of those, 15 minor public lands bills and a medical isotope production measure have passed the full Senate unanimously, without a roll call vote. But that is where the committee’s legislative momentum dries up.

Texas and New England may soon run short of the generating capacity they need to reliably meet peak loads, largely because old plants will be retired rather than retrofitted to meet new pollution rules, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation reported on Monday.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Jeff Bingaman will wait until next year to introduce legislation that would require utilities to generate a portion of their electricity from low-carbon sources.