For a classic example of federal government incompetence coupled with Congressional irresponsibility, look no farther than the Department of Energy’s Savannah River weapons plant in South Carolina, 25 miles southeast of Augusta, Ga. DOE is reluctantly managing a financially disastrous project born to produce plutonium 239 and tritium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program. Those […]

When it comes to the ability of wind power to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, is there less than meets the eye? That’s the argument that Australian energy engineer and geologist Peter Lang makes in a filing with the Australian government earlier this spring and flagged by Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry on her Climate Etc. blog. […]

Amidst all the positive hype about battery storage of late, driven largely by Elon Musk’s unveiling of large lithium-ion batteries aimed at home storage of rooftop solar (the Tesla Powerwall) and utility scale electricity backup, at little-noticed article passed my desk (virtually, of course). There has been plenty of debunking of Musk’s batteries, and plenty […]

There’s good news and bad news for nuclear power in recent weeks. On balance, it looks like the bad news is more telling. First the good. The Tennessee Valley Authority says it expects to bring its Watts Bar 2 unit in service sometime this year. That will add 1,150 MW to TVA’s generating capacity. Then […]

Anyone who has ever worked for a federal government research agency knows that politics can interfere with unbiased research. It’s not a sound practice; many agencies resist. It happens nonetheless. In my experience as a journalist, it happens often at the Department of Energy. When I worked for the National Institutes of Health in the […]

Some of the anxieties about the smart grid go to the possibilities of security breaches, particularly at the interface of the distribution grid to the customer. Interest in the smart grid seems to be fading, as consumer-controlled electric devices, the “internet of things,” or, in our acronym-infected world, the IoT. These smart devices give homeowners, […]

Remember the Edsel? Most readers probably don’t, as they aren’t old enough to recall car events in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But I’m a geezer, as well as a car guy. I well remember Ford’s monumental failure, producing a mid-range car designed to compete with General Motors’ Buick and Oldsmobile lines. When Ford […]

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former Democrat, Independent, Republican mayor of New York City, is not one of my heroes. I don’t know whether he was a good or bad mayor of a difficult city to govern. His “stop-and-frisk” policies give me the willies. Beyond New York, I found his $50 million support of the Sierra […]

This spring marks the 200th anniversary of the first publication of William Smith’s stratigraphic map of the England. It was, as geologist and splendid writer Simon Winchester titled his 2001 book, “The Map that Changed the World.” The remembrance is getting a low-key acknowledgement in both the U.K. and U.S., to my chagrin. In this […]

Are fossil fuels finite, eventually doomed to run out as mankind exploits them? That’s the conventional wisdom, regardless of one’s views on how long that might be, and whether it really matters (as the higher prices of a diminishing resource should bring on new resources and technologies). But the frequent handwringing about peak gas, following […]