Thoughts of electric generating plants don’t usually conjure images of impressive architecture. Modern power plants (with a few exceptions such as the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant on California’s gorgeous coast) are mostly uninteresting industrial facilities, hardly worth a second glance. That wasn’t always the case, as a new book from Princeton Architectural Press, “Palazzos of […]

Call me a climate “lukewarmist.” I’ve long been a fan of Matt Ridley, a member of the British House of Lord and a veteran journalist with The Economist for years. I highlight his latest blog posting, which is his Oct. 19 lecture at Britain’s Royal Society. The title of Ridley’s lecture — “Global greening versus […]

Ohio utility regulators this week (Oct. 12, 2016) adopted a plan to rescue Akron-based FirstEnergy from its inability to compete in wholesale generation markets. The utility has threatened to close the generating company’s 2,210-MW Sammis coal-fired plant and the 908-MW Davis-Besse nuclear unit. The rather opaque order by the Public Utility Commission of Ohio, gives […]

Say goodnight, Tesla. You’re about to be strangled with a bowtie…a Bolt out of the blue. Sexy Tesla, losing money on every trendy $70,000 electric car it produces, and promising that its still-in-development battery electric Model 3 will come in at $35,000 and offer a range of 200 miles on a charge, is about to […]

Many advocates of a renewable revolution and the end of fossil fuels (and, for some in that cohort, the end of nuclear as well) are engaged in magical thinking. Wikipedia defines the phrase as “the attribution of causal or synchronistic relationships between actions and events which seemingly cannot be justified by reason and observation.” Topping the list […]

When Exelon earlier this year shocked the nuclear industry by declaring it would close its money-losing Clinton and Quad Cities plants in Illinois, the Chicago-based generating giant said it could change its mind if the state legislature would come up with a financial rescue package. That may happen, but the odds are against it. The […]

Apache Corp. has announced a major oil-and-gas discovery in an area of Texas that geologists previously dismissed as not likely to have recoverable hydrocarbons. That’s good news for energy consumers, including electric generators, although not particularly welcome for energy producers, where it could contribute to continuing soft prices. The Wall Street Journal reported that the […]

Two reading recommendations for the upcoming Labor Day weekend. One is non-fiction, the other is fiction. Both are relevant to those of us who seek to understand the U.S. electrical system. Both are excellent reads. Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future, is my nonfiction choice. Bakke gets it. […]

Golly. Gosh. Gee whiz. Did you know you can’t just plug in wind and solar capacity to replace coal and nukes? Clean in, dirty out? Of course, readers of this blog and POWER magazine understand the problem of renewable intermittency. Solar and wind MWs don’t equal coal, nuclear, or gas MWs. It’s been a topic […]

Ohio’s Thomas Alva Edison will take his well-deserved place in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol in Washington September 21, joining luminaries from the other states in the building’s rotunda, also known as the “Old Hall.” A rare bipartisan group from Congress announced the honor for arguably the greatest inventor in world history. The life-size […]