An innovative project that combines solar power with electric buses is POWER’s Distributed Energy Award winner. The microgrid it created can help the community during emergencies, as well as during peak

As coal plants are retired, power companies must decide what to do with sites. Some old plants have been added to the National Register of Historic Places and repurposed as commercial or office space, while

The Biden administration is fully behind development of new nuclear power technology. It is encouraging the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to look at “new approaches to regulation” as advanced

Maintenance equipment and tools have always been important for plant operators. In the early days, the tools were likely made entirely of iron and steel, copper and brass, lead, leather, rubber, or glass. Some

The PJM Interconnection’s Minimum Offer Price Rule (MOPR) was introduced in 2006 as a floor to bar new generators from artificially depressing capacity auction clearing prices through below-cost bids.

Many bioenergy industry proponents put forth carbon neutrality as a basis for their support. However, the claim may not hold up under scrutiny. By some accounts, biomass power plant emissions including those

Proper water chemistry has always been important for dependable steam plant operation, but it may be even more critical today due to changes in operating routines and increased plant cycling. Failure not only

Sometime around midnight on Dec. 22, 2008, a dike at the coal ash dewatering pond for the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA’s) 1,400-MW Kingston power plant in Roane County, Tennessee, failed. That led to what has been reported as the largest industrial spill in U.S. history. TVA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) initially estimated […]

Lithium-ion battery technology promises the first realistic approach to fully integrating intermittent solar and wind into the U.S. power system. Despite its recent growth and great potential, the battery

The Tennessee Valley Authority’s third coal plant conversion to gas combined cycle generation, at the venerable Allen plant near Memphis, Tennessee, created the most-efficient combined cycle plant in its

Is high-flying Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and purveyor of electric and self-driving cars (and maybe trucks), battery storage for solar systems, private-sector space ships, and “hyper-loop” transportation, headed for a crash? That’s the case that the investment website Seeking Alpha makes in a devastating analysis of trendy Tesla, where continued losses only seem to pump […]

The Department of Energy-generated notice of proposed rulemaking at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, aimed at rescuing coal and nuclear power generation from the vagaries of competitive markets by raising the idea of paying out-of-market prices for “resilient” generating technologies, rests on the idea of rewarding power plants that have a 90-day supply of fuel […]

The focus of the coverage of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) plan to kill the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) has been on what it will mean for coal. The consensus is that it won’t have much impact, as major consumers of steam coal have already written off the fuel as a result of […]

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission got blitzed this week with comments on the Department of Energy’s proposed rule to give nuclear and coal plants a competitive advantage in competitive wholesale markets run by regional transmission organizations (RTOs). Comments came in such volume Monday that it crashed FERC’s “eFiling” system, giving those making comments another day […]

What to do about the faltering nuclear power industry? Two analysts from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, in a new book, lay out what they believe is a policy agenda that can stem the growing closures of existing nuclear plants. In their book – “Keeping the Lights on at America’s Nuclear Power Plants” – […]

Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s ukase to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) last week—undo over 20 years of federal policy on national electric markets to aid coal and nuclear generation—is a joke. It is an entirely political screed devoid of intellectual content. That pretty much describes Perry. Rick Perry In an administration that bills itself […]

Despite spending more than $2 billion over the past 18 years, the Department of Energy’s advanced nuclear research and development program (NE) is a bust, according to an article in Environmental Research Letters and reported at Phys.Org, the website of the Institute of Physics.  According to lead researcher Ahmed Abdulla of University of California San […]

Former New Mexico Republican Sen. Pete Domenici died last week in Albuquerque from complications following abdominal surgery. He was 85.   Domenici was a tireless and bipartisan legislator over his career as the longest-serving senator in New Mexico history, from 1973 to 2009. He was also a thoroughly decent man who viewed political compromise as […]

Dystopian novels are not my normal literary cup of tea (1984 excepted). But I just finished reading Marc Elsberg’s Blackout, originally published in Germany in 2012 and translated into English this year. It’s a bone-chilling thriller about an international Luddite group attempting to destroy modern civilization by bringing down first the European and then the […]

The highly-touted Department of Energy’s grid study is anodyne and irrelevant but worthwhile nonetheless. Commissioned by new energy secretary Rick Perry in April, the order for the study charged the Department of Energy staff to examine whether current policy was responsible for base load coal and nuclear plant retirements that jeopardize the reliability of the […]

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is back in business, with three commissioners constituting a quorum. The agency has a scheduled monthly public meeting for Sept. 20. By then it may have a full slate of five commissioners. But getting FERC rolling again involved some peculiar political musical chairs on the part of the White House. […]

Is the highly-touted 2015 Paris climate accord substantive or merely international slight-of-hand? In a new paper in the British journal Nature, a group of six international scholars, led by David G. Victor of the University of California, San Diego, suggest that the agreement is proving to be a sham. Titled “Prove Paris was more than […]

While the Trump administration has been glacially slow in filling second-tier jobs at federal energy agencies, his nominees to date ring few warning bells among those who have followed appointments to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the Department of Energy. At FERC, which is far more important to the on-the-ground, day-to-day operations of […]

The legendary Beach Boys rock group in 1963 recorded “Be True to Your School” on their early album “Little Deuce Coupe.” Among the lyrics, “Now what’s the matter buddy, ain’t you heard of my school, it’s number one in the state.” Electric markets roil over what appear to be fundamental challenges to the market restructuring […]

The limitations of lithium-ion batteries, particularly for electric utility use, are well known: They have a short lifetime, they don’t like rapid cycling, they run out of power quickly, and they can catch on fire, particularly when linked together (as Elon Musk is planning for his South Australia project). So why have well-financed, well-thought-out high-tech […]

Behold, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC): Cheryl LaFleur, chairman and sole commissioner. Thanks to a largely feckless Trump administration, the five-member FERC now consists of only one member, leaving the commission, an important energy infrastructure agency, continued partially crippled for lack of a quorum. FERC has been hobbled since early February, when Trump demoted […]

Global warming activists, what are you afraid of? You have no majority public support for your assertion that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are solely responsible for a warming planet. You cling to a fake life raft of a “97% scientific consensus,” although many of those scientists have no expertise in climate science. You’re on the […]

A group of 21 prominent energy and climate experts, writing in the June 19 edition of PNAS (“Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”) finds that the argument by Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson that the U.S. can end carbon dioxide emissions with an energy diet entirely of wind, solar, and hydro “between 2050 and […]

Veteran global warming gadfly David Wojick is mounting a challenge to the way climate science is being taught in our schools, and raising money online for his venture. At the same time, Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt says he wants to mount teams to debate climate science, according to the Washington Post. Full disclosure: […]

Glenn Schleede, one of the most significant and least known figures in U.S. energy policy over the past 50 years, died May 7. He was 83. The cause of death was glioblastoma, a brain cancer he had been fighting for several years. Glenn Schleede Schleede served as a policy analyst and advisor to three Republican […]