NRG Energy Inc., one of Delaware’s largest industrial polluters, struck a deal with state regulators that will require it to shut down three of its four Indian River Power Plant generating units by 2013 in exchange for being allowed to continue to use one of its turbines without air emissions scrubbers for three more years.

A 2009 court order had mandated the shutdown of two of the plant’s turbines by 2011 and required the scrubber installation on a third turbine.

Profits at Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, dipped 23 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, the company said today.

The company reported net income of $6.05 billion, or $1.27 a share, for the previous quarter. The company posted net income of $7.82 billion, or $1.54 a share during the same period last year.

As part of a push to save energy rather than pay to build new plants, Idaho Power Co. has been paying its customers to cut power use at peak times for six years, a strategy that energy experts say could be replicated by other power companies across the country.

In response to the tenfold spike in peak-time energy prices in the past decade, Idaho Power began paying farmers in 2004 to turn off their pumps for up to 15 hours a week during times when air conditioners and other gadgets are on. The venture paid off, resulting in drop-offs of as much as 5.6 percent of peak power demand and reducing the utility’s need to build new plants.

Coca-Cola Co. has introduced new bottles that are made partially from plants, a move the company hopes will reduce its carbon footprint and better its image with environmentalists.

The new beverage container, which has “the same weight, the same feel, the same chemistry and functions exactly the same way” as a regular plastic bottle, according to a Coke spokeswoman, is made of 70 percent petroleum-based materials and 30 percent sugar cane-based materials. Traditional bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, the production of which consumed 17 million barrels of oil in 2006.

Microsoft Corp. sees the oil and gas industry as an ideal fit as the software giant looks to expand its commercial information technology business, CEO Steve Ballmer said during a conference in Houston yesterday.

“The power and importance of information is as obvious to leadership in oil and gas as any industry,” Ballmer said in an interview before a speech at the Microsoft-sponsored Global Energy Forum in Houston. He said the industry is “very opened-minded, frankly, to information technology as a tool and the kind of investment that sometimes has to go into information technology to improve productivity.”

The electric car developer Fisker Automotive Inc. has raised $115.3 million in private capital, funding that will allow the automaker to tap $528.7 million in conditional federal loans granted to it last year by the U.S. Energy Department.

The federal loans and private funds will help Fisker develop the Karma, the firm’s first plug-in hybrid car. The Karma, expected to retail for $87,900, will in turn lead to a lower-cost hybrid sedan, currently developed under the name Project Nina.

A coalition of investors has forced the energy giant Royal Dutch Shell PLC to review its investments into carbon-heavy production in the oil sands of Canada at the firm’s annual meeting this spring.

Cooperative Asset Management and 141 other institutional and individual shareholders forced the resolution onto the agenda of Shell’s audit committee. The groups say the oil sands investments raise “concerns for the long-term success of the company arising from the risks associated with oil sands.”

Iraq will likely start awarding deals to U.S.-based, oil-services firms to rebuild its infrastructure, having signed production contracts with international firms over the past few months to reinvigorate the industry.

The agreements will go toward drilling hundreds of new wells, repairing thousands of miles of pipeline and constructing new oil terminals in the Persian Gulf, among other projects.

A walk around the Detroit auto show, which began yesterday, quickly reveals how large of a bet automakers are placing on the electrification of automobiles.

The world’s car manufacturers are highlighting gas-battery hybrids and all-electric vehicles at the show, some of which will not be available for several years. Toyota Motor Co., the current leader in the hybrid market, announced yesterday that it would create a whole family of hybrid cars based on its Prius sedan.

The U.K. announced today that it has chosen companies to develop 32 gigawatts of wind energy at nine offshore sites, marking a step forward for what the government is describing as the world’s largest wind project.

Winners of the development projects included many of Europe’s largest energy companies and utilities, including RWE AG, E.ON AG, Centrica PLC, Scottish & Southern Energy PLC, Iberdrola SA, Statoil ASA and Siemens AG. The projects could cost about $159 billion, according to Crown Estate, the state-run property portfolio that owns the rights to the U.K. seabed.