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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 […]

Washington, D.C., September 18, 2015 – The original private-sector uranium enrichment firm in the U.S., which emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization a year ago, looks like it could be headed toward Chapter 7 liquidation. Earlier this month, the Department of Energy announced it will kill funding for the advanced centrifuge project of Centrus Energy […]

Washington, D.C., September 7, 2015 — Sarah Palin is a dope (which should come as no surprise). Appearing in a CNN interview last Sunday, Palin said she would like to become energy secretary in a Trump administration so she could “get rid of” the agency and fire herself, as if she were part of Trump’s […]

Washington, D.C., September 4, 2015 – Federal prosecutors in Philadelphia have charged three people in a $54.5 million criminal Ponzi scheme revolving around turning municipal waste into fertilizer through a bogus process called “biochar” and creating a “carbon-negative” community in Tennessee, through a Pennsylvania company called Mantria Corp. According to an FBI press release, the […]

Washington, D.C., August 26, 2015 – Chicago-based utility giant Exelon took two regulatory shots to the solar plexus at the end of August. Three of its nuclear plants failed to win in the PJM Interconnection’s newly-constituted capacity auction. Just days later, Exelon got a 3-0 thumbs down from the District of Columbia Public Service Commission […]

Washington, D.C., August 23, 2015 — A Department of Energy study, leaked by the Union of Concerned Scientists, finds that it would be far cheaper to dispose of 34 metric tons of plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in New Mexico than to convert it to mixed-oxide reactor fuel at DOE’s Savannah River Site. […]

When it comes to nuclear power plants, in recent year much of the industry and the Department of Energy have embraced the idea that smaller plants, built with off-site, prefabricated parts that could be easily shipped to construction sites, and capable of being scaled up with multiple units is proving misguided on multiple fronts. We […]

At lunch this week with friends who follow environmental politics — but not down to the nitty-gritty details — they asked my take on the long-awaited Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan to ratchet down on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. I told them my judgment was that the Environmental Protection Agency’s massive regulation […]

Thanks goodness the U.S. does not have, has never had, a comprehensive, centralized energy policy. In my 40 years of reporting on energy and environmental issues, a common theme has been that the U.S. lacks, and needs, an energy policy. Baloney. When you hear or read about how the U.S. needs an energy policy, hold […]

Is the Obama administration’s plan announced last week to bring solar power to less affluent individuals and to those who can’t put panels on their roofs – by boosting community solar — less than meets the eye? It looks that way to me. The rhetoric is appealing. The White House announced the “National Community Solar […]

A mismanaged government-owned electric utility is a major contributor to Puerto Rico’s debt crisis, which has burst onto the U.S. scene just as Greece’s financial travails have jumped onto the world’s agenda. Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory with strange legal ties to its governmental parent, a fruit in the victory of the U.S. war with […]

For a classic example of federal government incompetence coupled with Congressional irresponsibility, look no farther than the Department of Energy’s Savannah River weapons plant in South Carolina, 25 miles southeast of Augusta, Ga. DOE is reluctantly managing a financially disastrous project born to produce plutonium 239 and tritium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program. Those […]

When it comes to the ability of wind power to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, is there less than meets the eye? That’s the argument that Australian energy engineer and geologist Peter Lang makes in a filing with the Australian government earlier this spring and flagged by Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry on her Climate Etc. blog. […]

Amidst all the positive hype about battery storage of late, driven largely by Elon Musk’s unveiling of large lithium-ion batteries aimed at home storage of rooftop solar (the Tesla Powerwall) and utility scale electricity backup, at little-noticed article passed my desk (virtually, of course). There has been plenty of debunking of Musk’s batteries, and plenty […]

There’s good news and bad news for nuclear power in recent weeks. On balance, it looks like the bad news is more telling. First the good. The Tennessee Valley Authority says it expects to bring its Watts Bar 2 unit in service sometime this year. That will add 1,150 MW to TVA’s generating capacity. Then […]

Anyone who has ever worked for a federal government research agency knows that politics can interfere with unbiased research. It’s not a sound practice; many agencies resist. It happens nonetheless. In my experience as a journalist, it happens often at the Department of Energy. When I worked for the National Institutes of Health in the […]

Some of the anxieties about the smart grid go to the possibilities of security breaches, particularly at the interface of the distribution grid to the customer. Interest in the smart grid seems to be fading, as consumer-controlled electric devices, the “internet of things,” or, in our acronym-infected world, the IoT. These smart devices give homeowners, […]