San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station | Photo: Timothy Tolle/Flickr/Creative Commons License

Southern California Edison (SCE) will permanently close its ailing San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in San Diego County, the utility announced Friday. The company cited mounting costs and regulatory uncertainty as the main reasons for its decision.

The plant's two remaining units have been offline since January 2012, when radioactive steam was found to be leaking from tubes in Unit 3.

John Woolard, left, speaks at the 2009 National Clean Energy Summit | Photo: Center for American Progress Action Fund/Flickr/Creative Commons License

BrightSource Energy's CEO John Woolard is leaving the company after several months of discussion, according to a report Thursday in the San Jose Mercury News. The Oakland-based concentrating solar firm is building the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station a few miles from the Mojave National Preserve, and hopes to have its Palen Solar project approved by the California Energy Commission sometime this year.

Now that's a cool roof. Green roof at the California Academy of Sciences' in San Francisco | Photo: Michael Fraley/Flickr/Creative Commons License

Quick, answer this question without getting on a ladder: what color is your roof? If you're like 90 percent of Californians, your answer will be "dark." The most common color for roofing materials in the U.S. is black. And that's a problem. Summer sunshine can raise the roof's temperature by a startling amount, and that heats the interior of the building, leading to more energy use for climate control.

Fortunately there's a relatively straightforward fix, and it's called a "Cool Roof."

Quartzsite Solar's cousin in Tonopah | Photo: Don Brrrr/Flickr/Creative Commons License

Big news from the Interior Department this week as it gave final approval to three new renewable energy projects on public lands in Arizona and Nevada. But among all the self-congratulatory statements, one fact went almost unmentioned: one of those plants probably won't be built until the developer finds a California utility to buy the power, and that might not be easy.

This now-shuttered gas-fired plant at Huntington Beach won't be replaced by one in Rancho Cucamonga anytime soon | Photo: Haymarket Rebel/Flickr/Creative Commons License

A proposed natural-gas-fired power plant that would be built in Rancho Cucamonga has been postponed again, with hearings on the proposal deferred until at least June 2014. The San Gabriel Generating Station project, which would generate 656 megawatts of electrical power when completed, has been suspended since 2010 as its owners haven't been able to get the legal permission to add to the Inland Empire's air pollution burden.

Reid Gardner in December 2012 | Photo: Carl Berger/Flickr/Creative Commons License

The Nevada Assembly voted Monday night to order the shut down of a coal-fired power plant northeast of Las Vegas that supplies the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) with electrical power. The Reid Gardner Generating Station near the Moapa Paiute reservation has long been criticized for its contribution to southwestern air pollution.