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What to make of the Trump picks for top administration jobs so far? Chuck Todd of NBC News (and moderator of Meet the Press) had an analysis on a podcast Wednesday (Dec. 14), which struck me as insightful. Todd said he sees two sets of appointees, one made up of genuine Trump picks, and the […]

When a new administration arrives in Washington, business lobbying groups routinely assert that their interests mesh with those of the new political team in town. So it is with the nuclear power industry, where the Nuclear Energy Institute shortly after Donald Trump sealed his victory in the presidential race proclaimed their common interests. Maria Korsnick, […]

It was a remarkably ugly exercise of boardroom behavior, and now will cost Duke Energy $27 million (covered by insurance and paid to Duke itself ). In 2012, Duke Energy and Progress Energy, large investor-owned utilities in the Carolinas, agreed to a merger, largely brokered by Duke’s then-CEO Jim Rogers (not the legendary investor Jim […]

A dozen prominent federal administrative law experts have criticized the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s procedures in the now four-years-old dispute over whether FERC overstepped its authority in the case of the small Pennsylvania-based energy trader Powhattan Energy Fund. FERC contends that Powhatan trades in 2010 manipulated the PJM wholesale market. The issue is before a […]

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 […]

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 […]