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 […]