Blog

Unless you’ve been in a cave the last 24 hours (or at least off the internet), you’ve no doubt heard about Tesla’s move into the battery storage field. I attended the event last night and reported on it for POWER in the wee hours afterward. (The announcement came at night so Tesla CEO Elon Musk […]

Remember the Edsel? Most readers probably don’t, as they aren’t old enough to recall car events in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But I’m a geezer, as well as a car guy. I well remember Ford’s monumental failure, producing a mid-range car designed to compete with General Motors’ Buick and Oldsmobile lines. When Ford […]

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former Democrat, Independent, Republican mayor of New York City, is not one of my heroes. I don’t know whether he was a good or bad mayor of a difficult city to govern. His “stop-and-frisk” policies give me the willies. Beyond New York, I found his $50 million support of the Sierra […]

This spring marks the 200th anniversary of the first publication of William Smith’s stratigraphic map of the England. It was, as geologist and splendid writer Simon Winchester titled his 2001 book, “The Map that Changed the World.” The remembrance is getting a low-key acknowledgement in both the U.K. and U.S., to my chagrin. In this […]

Are fossil fuels finite, eventually doomed to run out as mankind exploits them? That’s the conventional wisdom, regardless of one’s views on how long that might be, and whether it really matters (as the higher prices of a diminishing resource should bring on new resources and technologies). But the frequent handwringing about peak gas, following […]

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) is a fool. Is he a dangerous fool or just a typical political buffoon? My suspicion is the latter. But I could be wrong. Here’s the story. Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, late last month sent letters to seven universities seeking information about the funding for […]

A long posting and following discussion on Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. blog on the topic of “Public intellectuals in the climate space” prompted me to recall an apposite thought, written long before the heated (and often overheated) arguments over global warming. A postcard on my office bulletin board, which I’ve had for at least a […]

A small Philadelphia energy trading firm, charged by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission with market manipulation, has fired back at the agency with a delightful in-your-face response. Dissecting FERC’s show cause order claiming that Powhatan Energy Fund manipulated the PJM market, Powhatan’s law firm, Drinker Biddle & Reath, makes it clear it is ready for […]

Two developments yesterday, one quiet, one rather loud, suggest the long-predicted existential threat to the traditional utility model may be at hand. The quiet news came from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), which reported that utility-scale solar generation crossed the 5-GW mark for the first time yesterday. Between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. PST, […]

In late January, President Obama traveled to India and met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a photo op, touting a new civilian nuclear power deal. Obama claimed that the new deal was a “breakthrough understanding.” The Washington Post reported, “The White House said the agreement involved the provision of insurance pools and an assurance […]

For more than 25 years, feedback-loop global circulation models (GCMs) have been the staple of predictions of the pace of global warming and the effects of the warming on the world. A new PhD dissertation from The Netherlands casts fundamental doubts about the value of the models. (A hat-tip to Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry for […]

The image on the back of a Cuban $10 peso bill is a line drawing of a diesel-fired generator, a line worker, overhead high-voltage electric transmission, oil refineries, two windmills and a modern pickup truck (not American, of course). Above that image is the phrase “REVOLUCION ENERGETICA,” or energy revolution. Cuba clearly needs an energy […]

The dramatic collapse in the price of oil—currently flirting with sub-$40/barrel levels—has naturally produced an explosion of commentary on its short- and long-term effects. One curious, though predictable, narrative is starting to emerge from the environmental left: The price collapse is the death knell to shale oil, and the U.S. oil boom—which was never a […]

There’s a historical backstory to the closure of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant late last year, which got no mention in the general accounts of the venerable reactor’s demise. The plant played a key role in the 1960s in the evolving issue of “thermal pollution” and once-through cooling of large power plants, a topic still […]

The extensive shale deposits in the U.S. have been getting a lot of attention in recent years as technology has unlocked hydrocarbon deposits trapped in their rock strata – natural gas and natural gas liquids in the Mid-Atlantic states, gas in Texas, and crude oil (and lots of it) and gas in North Dakota. But […]

Last winter saw extreme weather – remember the “polar vortex”? – severely disrupt coal supplies to power plants in the upper Midwest (particularly Minnesota) that burn Powder River Basin coal. Plants had to reduce output, coal piles dwindled to the point they were single digit days away from exhaustion, and the BNSF Railway, the major […]

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s regular monthly meeting on December 18 will feature an unusual agenda item: a detailed look at winter coal deliveries to power plants. FERC said in a press release that it will “convene a panel discussion” on coal transportation problems, with witnesses from it staff, the Department of Transportation’s Surface Transportation […]

Touted as the world’s largest solar power plant, the 392-MW Ivanpah concentrating solar project in California’s Mojave Desert is underperforming and seeking a federal bailout on top of federal subsidies to build the project. Owned by Google and NRG Energy, Ivanpah was built with a $1.6 billion U.S. Department of Energy loan in 2011, out […]

Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1990. The key to the 1990 amendments, and the previous versions of the air law, was state implementation of federal requirements. State regulators would implement the federal requirements on state-regulated electric companies. In 1992, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which started a major transformation in the electricity […]

It’s too early to be measuring Don Blankenship for a prison-striped suit. He was the odious Massey Energy CEO in April 2010 when the company’s Upper Big Branch (UBB) coal mine in Raleigh County in southern West Virginia exploded and killed 29 miners. Blankenship faces federal charges that could put him in jail for the […]

The on-again, off-again new federal ozone rules are on again, as the Obama administration the day before Thanksgiving announced it will revise the air standard for ground-level ozone to a range of 65 parts per billion to 75 ppb (the current standard, set in 2008), with a request for comments on the possibility of a […]

Hoping to apply the smarts they showed in the online world, in 2007 engineers at Google decided they would save Mother Earth from global warming. The company concluded that renewable energy was the path of the future and created RE<C, a moon shot approach to make renewables cheaper than fossil fuels. In 2011, Google quietly […]

Roger Pielke, Jr. has written the book on the relationship between climate change and weather disasters. Literally. His new book – Disasters & Climate Change – became available last week. The slim text (114 pages) is the best, clearest exposition yet of why the claims that particular weather events – droughts, floods, Superstorm Sandy and […]

Fractivists and climate campaigners have besieged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission of late, charging that the independent agency is erecting barriers to combating global warming by granting approval for new natural gas pipelines and LNG export terminals. Activists have appeared at FERC’s normally dry-as-dust monthly public meetings to make their claims that the agency is […]

The crash of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate following this month’s elections and the unseating of Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada as majority leader has supporters of the Department of Energy’s stagnant Yucca Mountain storage site for spent civilian nuclear fuel singing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Is the refrain premature? Former Democratic Sen. […]

San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer was demonstrably a heck of a hedge fund investor. But as an investor in partisan politics, he’s a bust. Steyer, the green equivalent of the Koch brothers on the right, reportedly poured $76 million of his personal holdings into his NextGen Climate Action PAC. Steyer’s political action committee is on […]

Tuesday’s sweeping Republican electoral triumph likely will see its greatest impact on the power industry at the state level, where governors often appoint state regulators and set state policy on many energy and environmental topics. What happened Tuesday in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts in gubernatorial races illustrates the point. In Pennsylvania, one of the few highlights […]

President Obama named Allison Macfarlane to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and appointed her chairman in July 2012 largely to restore some calm to the chaos that reigned at the NRC under the chairmanship of Greg Jaczko, whose patron was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Her expertise in nuclear waste issues – a geologist, she […]

Robert W. Fri, long a major figure in environmental and energy policy in Washington, although better known to the public as a director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, died October 10 at Sibley Hospital in Washington. The Washington Post obituary said the cause was lung cancer. He was 78. As an […]

The Sierra Club’s frequently silly “Beyond Natural Gas” campaign just got a whole lot sillier. Last week, the New Jersey chapter put out the claim that repowering an old coal- and oil-fired power plant in Cape May with natural gas would hurt area reliability. If that sounds like an odd statement from an environmental group, […]