Blog

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 19 November 2012 – One of the more interesting back stories of the saga of Tropical Storm Sandy and its devastation of Long Island’s electric power system is a tale of Cuomo father and son.  Father is former New York Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo and the son is current New […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 9 November 2012 – “Three-dimensional musical chairs” best describes what happens in Washington during the start of a second presidential term. The jockeying for position can get confusing and nasty as folks seek to move up, down, around and out as the administration rearranges its second-term priorities. Sharp elbows can […]

By Thomas W. Overton There’s an old adage, “If you’re going to take a shot at the king, you’d better kill him.” No doubt this theme is reverberating around coal country boardrooms this week. Big Coal was one of the most prolific industries supporting Mitt Romney and the GOP this season.  Though estimates vary and […]

By Kennedy Maize (@kennedymaize) Washington, D.C., 7 November, 2012 — With Barack Obama given another four-year lease on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the policy and regulatory landscape for the electricity business is largely unchanged. But the roadmap may be somewhat different. Obama’s reelection represents neither an endorsement nor a repudiation of his policy initiatives on such […]

By Kennedy Maize (@kennedymaize) Washington, D.C., 24 October 2012 – Here’s one for climate science and policy wonks. Remember the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill? Among the community of the climate alarmed, there was much gnashing of teeth, tearing of hair, and sack cloth and ashes when the legislation that passed the Democratic House in 2009 died […]

By Kennedy Maize (@kennedymaize) Washington, D.C., 15 October 2012 – Would Republican Mitt Romney be tougher-minded than Barack Obama when it comes to some of the most egregious energy subsidies flowing out of Washington? As election day mercifully approaches, a duo of libertarian energy experts has examined Romney’s rhetoric on energy. They find that “the […]

By Kennedy Maize (@kennedymaize) Washington, D.C., 6 Oct. 2012 — A big science boondoggle bit the dust this month, giving the quest for fusion energy another black eye. But look for the high-energy physicists who have been living off of fusion confusion for more than a generation to mount a rescue mission, claiming somehow that […]

By Thomas W. Overton, JD As unlikely as it might have seemed a few months ago, recent developments in the ongoing saga over the beleaguered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) have begun to raise the previously unthinkable possibility that the plant may never restart. Publicly, of course, the authorities are saying nothing of the […]

By Kennedy Maize (@kennedymaize) Washington, D.C., 9 September 2012 — If you are looking for direction on what energy policy and politics in the U.S. might look like after the November election, don’t expect much guidance from the two party platforms. Nor have the contenders had much of substance to say on the topic. Given […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 6 August 2012 — It’s been a rough road for nuclear advocates in the U.S. of late, although nothing seems to dent the Pollyanna armor of the nuclear crowd, always appearing to believe a revival is just over the horizon and headed into view. Here are a few fraught developments […]

By Kennedy Maize (@kennedymaize) Washington, D.C., 31 July 2012 – What to make of the two successive, horrendous electric power failures in India? The smart money avoids conclusory leaps. When the first cascading blackout hit on Monday, there was much media chatter about generating capacity. The implication was that the outage was demand-driven. But there […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., July 14, 2012 — A group of mainstream conservatives and representatives from Washington environmental groups have been meeting over recent weeks to revive the idea of a U.S. carbon tax as a way to combat alleged man-made global warming. The aim is to have a package of proposed laws to […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., June 26, 2012 – Pardon my déjà vu, but an article in Monday’s Washington Post, citing a study of how the Interior Department’s coal leasing program in the Powder River Basin is mismanaged, takes me back 30 years. The study by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis claims […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., June 25, 2012 – When it comes to electric infrastructure, no state is more dysfunctional than California. That observation, based on many years of observing the twists and turns of California electricity policy, is highlighted by the problems the state now faces with the possibility of the San Onofre nuclear […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., June 17, 2012 — If the Obama administration is, as Republicans charge, the most anti-business administration in U.S. history, why is it doing everything it can to save publicly-traded uranium enrichment enterprise USEC from itself? Could Ohio have something to do with it? We are shocked, shocked, as shocked as […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., June 12, 2012 – It’s hard to cry the blues for a union worker at a nuclear power plant making $122,000 a year with a good health plan and a solid 401(k). That’s the situation of the average striking (or locked out, if you will) member of Local 369 of […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 3 June 2012 — An international effort is underway to give control and governance of the Internet to a United Nations agency, with implications for ways that U.S. utilities might implement smart grid technologies. Led by Russia and China, the plan to turn the Internet over to the International Telecommunications […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 5 May 2012 — A Federal Energy Regulatory Commission financial audit finds that the North American Electric Reliability Corp. is failing to focus its work on the new, mandatory electric grid reliability powers Congress gave it in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Instead, says the FERC staff audit released May […]

By Thomas W. Overton, JD The news blogosphere was briefly contorted earlier this week by a study published in Nature Climate Change that appeared (to some laymen, at least) to suggest that large-scale wind farms were contributing to global warming. Naturally, given the intersection of several hot-button issues (renewable energy and climate change), and the […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 28 April 2012 — A vexing problem faces those who advocate massive global political and economic responses to a warming climate allegedly marred by mankind’s insatiable appetite for goods and services that produce carbon dioxide. The data to justify climatastrophism are mighty thin. As Woody Guthrie put it in a […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 19 April 2012 — Advice to NRC commissioner Kristine Svinicki: it’s time to start polishing that resume. Your days on the regulatory commission are over. The term of Republican Svinicki, who led an unsuccessful attempted regicide of NRC chairman Greg Jaczko last year, expires June 30. Under the law, the […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 16 April 2012 — So clever of the White House. President Obama says his administration’s latest energy strategy — mimicking his GOP adversaries — is “all of the above.” This is the “welcome ever more trotters into the trough” approach. And most everybody who makes energy loves the free lunch. […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 28 March 2012 — Just how significant is the Obama administration’s new regulation on carbon dioxide emissions from new coal-fired power plants, announced yesterday? From here, it looks like a fair amount of ado about not very much. In today’s cynical political environment, it’s hard not to see the Environmental […]

By Thomas W. Overton San Diego, 20 March 2012 — A fair amount of ink has been spilled in the commodities market over record natural gas storage inventories in the U.S. As of March 9, they stood at 2,369 Bcf, a whopping 735 Bcf more than this point last year, and well above the previous […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., March 20 2012 — The most important economist you probably have never heard of is William Stanley Jevons. Contemplating the convergence of coal, industry, and technology in the middle of the 19th Century, Jevons explained why increasing efficient use of coal meant more, not less, use of the dusky diamonds […]

By Thomas W. Overton, JD San Diego, 16 March 2012 — Yesterday, the NRC announced that it is sending a special team to San Onofre after several steam generator tubes in one of the reactors failed an inspection. This isn’t good, but probably sounds worse than it is. First, full disclosure and some background: I […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 14 March 2012 — Climate science is a wicked mess. That’s not a political statement or a casual description of the difficulties of the man-made global warming knife fight. It’s a technical term some social scientists use to shed light on complex, convoluted, interconnected problems. It also provides a useful […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., March 4, 2012 — Conflating climate and energy policy in the U.S. over the past several decades has produced incoherent policy in both areas, along with considerable confusion and loss of focus, argues economist Denny Ellerman in the current issue of Economics of Energy & Environmental Policy, the journal of […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., February 13, 2012 — Environmental activists have a long record of miscalculation and misadventure. That’s been particularly true when it comes to coal. Remember acid rain? No such thing, according to a decade-long government scientific inquiry (which can’t ever quite turn itself off). Global warming? A global yawn, Al Gore […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., January 29, 2012 — Detroit is back and the year 2012 looks promising for U.S. automakers. But unlike the hype of early last year, the color that most of the auto industry is seeing in its dreams for 2012 isn’t green, it’s black. That’s in black ink, which has firmly […]