Another Department of Energy clean coal technology project is staggering and looks like it is about to fall well short of the finish line. This time, it is the Texas Clean Energy Project, into which DOE has committed some $450 million, and which the agency’s inspector general has said has consistently missed project deadlines and […]

Molly Macauley, a prominent economics researcher on space, science and climate issues at the Washington think tank Resources for the Future, was murdered while walking her two rescue dogs last Friday night around 11 p.m. in the upscale Baltimore neighborhood of Roland Park. According to police reports, she was stabbed and died at a local […]

Nuclear power in the U.S. appears to be in a major decline, with announced retirements and potential retirements far outpacing the four new projects (I don’t count TVA’s Watts Barr 2 as “new”) now underway. At the same time, the world outside the U.S., particularly Asia, is seeing substantial growth of nuclear generating capacity, with […]

More news from the fusion “fornever” front. Physics Today reports that the Department of Energy’s highly-touted inertial confinement laser fusion project – known as the National Ignition Facility or NIF – looks like a bust. If so, it would join all the other big-government failures over decades to establish fusion as a source of electric […]

My late father was a mining engineer. He had lots of interactions with economists over his long career in government, the private sector, and academia. His take: “An economist is someone who goes from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion.” I was reminded of his view by a report in Electricity Daily of a […]

Much of what has been the policy prescription for global warming from greens and the left – a 100% renewable energy system based on cheap solar and wind generation, low-cost storage, and policies for managing consumer demand — which might be characterized as “decarbonization” – is likely to fail and make matters worse. That’s the […]

Self-indulgent. Pointless. Arrogant. Undemocratic. Zealotry. Those are just a few epithets I would direct at the loony leftist “fracktivists” who have targeted the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for protests over the commission’s exercise of its duties under law with regard to siting natural gas infrastructure. The whacktivists, who have revived their protests from last fall […]

Don’t like much about LWRs, Molten salt doesn’t thrill me at all. Sodium makes me want to run, But helium looks cool. I’ve seen what may be the future of civilian nuclear power, thanks to Dr. Christina Back at General Atomics in San Diego. I hope it works. It isn’t going to be easy. GA […]

Could this be a connect-the-dots situation? On April 27, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Andre Porter, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, is stepping down, taking a job with an unnamed regional electric transmission organization. Electricity Daily speculated that the job might be with the PJM Interconnection. On April 27, the Federal […]

I was at my desk in the Energy Daily newsroom on April 26, 1986 when someone handed me a bulletin ripped from one of the wire service machines in the National Press Club building in Washington, where our office was located. The bulletin said a nuclear power plant had exploded in the Ukraine in the […]

Concentrated solar energy – power towers using vast fields of mirrors to focus heat from the sun on a water-filled target, making steam, generating electric power and also liquefying salts to provide thermal energy storage – was a hot (excuse the pun) technology a few years ago. Today, it may be a dead end, as […]

Years ago, a friend said he viewed electric utilities as an example of “no-fault capitalism,” because state regulators always bail the companies out when they make bad business decisions. That was before the mid-1990s restructuring that brought competition to many markets that were previously monopolies. Among them was Ohio’s utility system, an entrenched monopoly environment […]

For years, nuclear power advocates have argued that man-made global warming is an existential threat to the planet and nuclear power is the only way to reverse the greenhouse effect. Those advocates have included the usual suspects: the Nuclear Energy Institute (the industry’s Washington lobbying group); nuclear electric utilities; members of Congress from states heavily […]

This week, as the Asia Vision LNG carrier was steaming toward Brazil carrying the first export of liquefied U.S. natural gas, the Democratic candidates for their party’s presidential nomination were promising to vastly scale back or eliminate the technology that made that gas export possible. At a debate in Michigan last Sunday, both Hillary Clinton […]

The U.S. coal industry is in a tail spin. That’s particularly true of eastern, underground coal, less so of low-cost Powder River Basin surfaced-mined coal in Wyoming and Montana. Companies are closing eastern mines, firing miners, filing for bankruptcy protection and reorganization. Large parts of the legendary Eastern coal industry are struggling, perhaps never to […]

The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia complicates the already complex judicial review of the Obama administration’s Clean Coal Plan. According to Washington-area attorney David Masselli, who practices before the court, the “extraordinary” stay the court granted by 5-4 to prevent the new Environmental Protection Agency rules from going into effect until the Supreme […]

When Entergy discovered small amounts of tritium in the water in three of 40 monitoring wells at its Indian Point nuclear plant north of New York City last week, it must have sent off pulsating political alarms in the New Orleans headquarters. The company is involved in a long-running battle with anti-nuclear and environmentalist activists, […]

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, historically a political backwater that attracts little attention other than from energy geeks, has moved into the Washington limelight in recent years. FERC has seen partisan battles over appointments to the obscure commission and wrangling – sometime internecine – over the chairmanship. FERC could draw inside-the-beltway attention again this year […]

The argument over the economics of distributed solar versus utility solar got played out in the real world in Nevada earlier this year. Utilities won decisively. While there is much gnashing of teeth and moaning of doom from the rooftop troops, the outcome is positive for most Nevada electricity consumers — those who don’t have […]

There’s a word that best describes what’s going on with Ohio investor-owned utilities these days: “re-regulation.” The Buckeye State’s two largest IOUs, having lived in competitive power markets for some 20 years, have decided they prefer the good old days of guaranteed markets and regulated returns. FirstEnergy, based in Akron, and American Electric Power, headquartered […]

Washington, D.C. — As the Obama administration enters its final year in Washington, it is worth looking at what has changed in the U.S. energy arena since the administration began in 2009. A lot is different, and mostly positive. How much credit or blame belongs to White House initiatives and government policy is arguable. I […]

Washington, D.C. — What to make of the results from this month’s Paris global warming gabfest? Both the Wall Street Journal editorial page and primo climate catastrophist James Hansen agree. Both have denounced the deal in Paris as a fraud. Here’s Hansen, quoted in The Guardian, a left-wing British newspaper: “It’s a fraud, really, a […]

David Crane was the face of NRG Energy, a visionary executive, for a dozen years. He was building a company on a large base of fossil-fueled non-utility generation supporting  a transition to a purveyor of non-utility, distributed generation based on renewables, both large-scale wind and solar, and a network of rooftop photovoltaic systems linked together […]

Washington, D.C. – “Follow the money.” That’s the famous advice that Deep Throat offered Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the film version of their Watergate book All the President’s Men. It’s good advice in sussing out what’s going to be happening in the swirling, often chaotic and confusing days ahead in the Paris climate […]

Washington, D.C. – The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has upheld the broad power of retail electricity customers to participate in commission proceedings, rejecting an argument by a FERC administrative law judge to shut out end-use customers from the commission’s activities. In an order on Nov. 12, the commission ruled unanimously that “as courts have recognized, […]

As this blog predicted last month, New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. continues closing its nuclear plants located in competitive wholesale markets. POWER News reported last week that Entergy would shut down the 838-MW FitzPatrick boiling water reactor in Oswego County, N.Y., on the shores of Lake Ontario near Syracuse at the end of its current fuel […]

Should retail electricity customers be barred from bringing cases before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a decades-long practice? A FERC administrative law judge, Carmen Citron, last month recommended to the commission that it abandon its long-standing practice and deny retail customers standing before the agency. Cintron’s mid-October recommendation came in a case involving an Arkansas […]

The Washington Post has discovered electricity and the newspaper’s naivety is astonishing. In the first of a series the newspaper says will be “exploring how the world’s hunger for cheap electricity is complicating efforts to combat climate change” (and no doubt trolling for a Pulitizer) reporter Joby Warrick reveals to readers that, can you believe […]

Is Entergy, once among the most bullish utility systems for nuclear, preparing to get out of its ambitious merchant atomic power program? That’s the view of Julien Dumoulin-Smith, the respected UBS electricity utility analyst. In a report for his clients in early October, Dumoulin-Smith suggested that New Orleans-based Entergy is “kickstarting the exit process” on […]

The history of the U.S. electricity industry over the past 100 years is convoluted and often confusing. For those who want to make sense of the course of events from the days of Samuel Insull’s iron-clad monopoly to current policy attempts to deal with global warming with a partially-competitive market, a new book by veteran […]