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 […]