Exelon has today increased its offer to acquire NRG Energy by 12.4%. Yesterday, NRG had again recommended that its shareholders reject Exelon’s original offer, saying that it undervalued the company, but said that it would consider an increased offer.

Exelon has now offered to buy all the outstanding NRG common stock in an all-stock transaction with a fixed exchange rate of 0.545 of a share of Exelon common stock for each NRG share. The company said that this increased offer represents value of over $3 billion to NRG shareholders.

Under pressure to deliver sharply higher fuel economy in coming years, U.S. automakers are deepening ties with electric utilities as rechargeable cars move from the drawing board and head toward the dealership.

Both the embattled auto industry and the utilities are retooling and both industries have a stake in the success of the growing effort to deliver electric-powered vehicles to U.S. consumers…

Major utilities have established alliances with U.S. and foreign automakers in developing electrified vehicles, but they have less at stake, said Jim Piro, chief executive of investor-owned utility Portland General Electric Co., which is working with Nissan Motor Co Ltd and Mitsubishi Motors Corp.

Utilities will need to make major infrastructure changes that tie in to the need for plug-ins to work — like power grid development — even if electric cars remain a niche market, executives say.

Maryland regulators gave UniStar Nuclear energy approval to build a US-EPR at the Calvert Cliffs site, according to Constellation Energy. UniStar is a joint venture of Constellation and Electricite de France. The Maryland Public Service Commission issued UniStar a certificate of public convenience and necessity June 29 after completing an 18-month review that included multiple public hearings, Constellation said. The certificate is required before Calvert Cliff-3 can be built.

The U.S. Department of Energy plans to unlock $3.3 billion in federal stimulus grants, as much as $200 million apiece, to companies and utilities to help develop a smarter, faster power grid.

The first round of applications is due July 29, with future rounds in December and March 2010 if money remains.

It seems like almost every utility and power producer in America is jumping on the renewable energy bandwagon. So what could be wrong with that? Well, one thought is that the current valuations across the entire renewable and green energy sector are not justified by realistic or realizable forecasted cash flows or current enterprise Values measured by hard assets which generate actual electricity or create some other form of tangible value.

This should remind one of the internet boom, in which hundreds of billions of dollars changed hands on the back of a paper napkin essentially, and was the domain for high risk venture capital, distressed investor capital and hot money, which ran the sector from 0 to 100 almost overnight, only to abandon the technology sector as quickly as they entered in what became one of the largest boom and bust cycles the U.S. has ever seen.

The Federal Communications Commission approved Embarq’s merger with CenturyTel — the last approval needed before the two companies can combine.

The merger is scheduled to take effect Wednesday.

Embarq, which broke off from Sprint in 2006, provides local and long-distance telephone, Internet and satellite TV services locally and in several other states.

The combined company will begin operating under the name CenturyLink.

Since the economic crisis began last autumn, the once red-hot activity by wind and solar developers has slowed sharply. The U.S. government’s stimulus package is supposed to help (although some portions of its aid for renewable energy have not yet been disbursed).

But many advocates of renewable energy are thinking longer term. What happens when the stimulus funding runs out, as it is scheduled to do for the industry’s projects in the next year or two?…

Perhaps because of its relative newness and small size, the renewable energy industry has been hobbled by a history of uncertain funding.

Two of the nation’s biggest coal-burning utilities said Thursday that they were withdrawing from a $2.4 billion project to demonstrate carbon capture and storage, and would instead pursue their own work in the field.

The announcement by the utilities, Southern Company and American Electric Power, is a blow to the multinational consortium called the FutureGen Alliance. The group is seeking to build a $2.4 billion plant in Mattoon, Ill., that would convert coal to a fuel gas, capture the carbon dioxide and then burn the gas in a turbine to make electricity. Financing for the project was uncertain even before the announcement by the two utilities.

After the vote was held up for more than a week, Julius Genachowski was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the next chairman of the FCC.

Once sworn in, Genachowski is expected to preside over the July 2 meeting. Acting Chairman Michael Copps will return to commissioner status.

The re-nomination of Republican Commissioner Robert McDowell also was confirmed. McDowell will serve his first full term. He replaced former FCC Chairman Michael Powell mid-term.

Two seats in the five-member body remain open.

NATIONAL GRID is planning to add environmental targets to the criteria for its executive bonus scheme.

Final details are still being drawn up but, in principle, 5% of the executive directors’ annual bonuses will be linked to green targets.

The company is carrying out a detailed audit on each of its businesses to establish what their emissions are, where they come from, and how they are measured.

Once the latest audit is completed this summer, National Grid will be able to set new car-bon-reduction targets that will be used as one of the criteria for the bonus scheme.