Blog

By Kennedy Maize After almost unrelenting hype, skepticism about plug-in hybrid cars is beginning to emerge in the mainstream media. It’s a good thing, as much about the much-ballyhooed vehicles, particularly the General Motors Chevy Volt, doesn’t withstand serious business or technical scrutiny. In early June, Jim Motavalli at the “Wheels” blog at the New […]

By Kennedy Maize Remember the nuclear power renaissance coming any day soon now? Fugetaboudit. While the stars seemed aligned for new nuclear power in the U.S. in 2005 when Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, it’s all turned brown and runny. The promise of some $15 billion in loan guarantees for new nukes in the […]

By Kennedy Maize As a democrat (that’s with a small “d” and a large “D”), I have a great deal of faith in the wisdom of the American people. That’s why I’m not surprised that the hysteria over alleged man-made global warming is in rapid decline in public opinion polls. It’s no longer in the […]

By Kennedy Maize Here’s an interesting set of ironies. The Republican majority on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has taken a position that, at least formally, blocks new nuclear reactors in the U.S., while the sole Democrat on the commission, Chairman Greg Jaczko, widely viewed as opposed to the agenda of the nuclear industry, has […]

Jon Wellinghof, the latest chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is, by his own words, a doofus. As reported in Power News this week, Wellinghoff said the U.S. may never need new baseload electric generating capacity.  Why? Because wind will be so cheap it will get sent out first in an economic dispatch regime. […]

By Kennedy Maize The Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is declaring that carbon dioxide, a life-giving and ubiquitous atmospheric chemical, is a threat to public health. That’s a completely illogical determination, but also completely expected. The notion that carbon dioxide is a pollutant has nothing to do with chemistry or physics or biology or climatology, […]

By Kennedy Maize A report in the Wall Street Journal that Russian and Chinese spy hackers have penetrated the U.S. electric power grid, and left malware and root kits, cyber time bombs, to explode in the future strikes me as bogus. The story had no named sources, and the details were sketchy at best. Where […]

By Kennedy Maize Is biology the key to improved battery performance? Researchers in a recent issue of Science magazine describe how genetically-engineered viruses could boost the power of lithium ion batteries, expected to be the batteries of choice for plug-in hybrid vehicles. A research team led by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used […]

One of my favorite folk songs from the Great Depression is “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” which I remember hearing sung by Burl Ives, the bearded and burley tenor who, among other gigs, performed with Pete Seeger and the Weavers in the 1950s (boy, does that date me). One of the lines in the song […]

By Kennedy Maize Coming in this Sunday’s (March 29) New York Times magazine is a splendid profile of one of the more important global warming skeptics: Freeman Dyson of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies. The article by Nicholas Dawidoff – “The Civil Heretic” – is required reading for those who believe climate change is the […]

The Obama administration’s energy secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, has quickly become Dr. Who. As a recent New York Times article noted, Chu has repeatedly stumbled politically, demonstrating that being a Nobelist in physics is no qualification for the bumps-and-grinds of energy politics in Washington. The Times observed that Chu is most comfortable with the science […]

Here’s a hoot. Call it thinking “outside the box,” or, more specifically, thinking outside the boundaries drawn by Congress. Maybe we can drill for oil and gas in the 1002 lands in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska from outside the refuge. The technology is directional drilling, which the oil and gas industry has […]

When it comes to future electricity supply, the Obama administration is engaged in an implicit con game. Whether the president knows this, which I doubt, there must be smart people in his circle who understand that the promises he makes about renewable energy simply don’t stand up to the delusions they create. Those people are […]

I’m a George Orwell fanatic. I own, and display proudly in my office, every book he wrote (Homage to Catalonia is the best), every Orwell (1903-1950) biography, and every critical study of his work. I also have the four-volume edited collection of his works, compiled by his widow, Sonia Orwell, and their friend and collaborator […]

By Kennedy Maize When it comes to access for transmission lines to bring renewable power from where it is located to folks who can use it, who poses the biggest obstacles? In the West, according to Pedro J. Pizarro, Southern California Edison’s vice president of power operations, a chief villain is Uncle Sam. Federal land […]

By Kennedy Maize Princeton physicist Will Happer, a prominent skeptic about man-made global warming, told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Feb. 25 that the earth is in a “CO2 famine,” and more atmospheric carbon dioxide would be a very good thing indeed. “Almost never have CO2 levels been as low” as in the […]

By Kennedy Maize Yucca Mountain is stretched out on its deathbed. Earlier this month, the nuclear industry effectively agreed that the plan to bury spent nuclear reactor fuel under the Nevada mountain on federal government property is ready for political last rites. At meetings with Wall Street analysts and state utility regulators in February, leaders […]

By Kennedy Maize Here’s a delicious irony. In South Carolina, an iconic former Republican governor and the current Republican governor, who reportedly has presidential ambitions, are feuding over a coal-fired power plant proposed by the state government’s own electric utility. Most intriguing is that the former governor, oral surgeon Jim Edwards, 81, Ronald Reagan’s first […]

By Kennedy Maize “Stimulus” has become the universal political solvent in Washington since the advent of the Obama administration. No matter what narrow special interest, no matter what piece of local pork or advocacy policy preference, it all gets dissolved and incorporated into the administration’s stimulus package. You call it “stimulus.” I call it “earmarks.” […]

By Kennedy Maize   Congress will make a big mistake if it provides money for accelerated wind power development as part of the Obama administration’s new economic stimulus program, according to veteran energy analyst Glenn Schleede. Instead, he says in a recent privately-published paper, “Investment in energy efficient light bulbs would save more than five […]

By Kennedy Maize A retired Entergy Co. executive, who has loads of hands-on operating experience at nuclear power plants, is a major contender for an open seat on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Daniel F. Packer Jr., 61, who was the first African-American to manage a U.S. nuclear power plant (Entergy’s Waterford plant), confirmed to […]

By Kennedy Maize Spare me the hype about electric cars. Allegedly “green” technology was a theme at the latest Detroit auto show, as chronicled by the New York Times last Sunday. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Been there, done that, didn’t work. In the early 1980s, electric cars were going to be the way to […]

By Kennedy Maize Can you spell “poser?” Here’s my offering: “Eric Massa (D-N.Y.)” Massa, newly elected Congressman from New York’s 29th district (that’s Corning, the glass folks), showed up in Washington earlier this week to be sworn in as a member of the House of Representatives in the 111th Congress, having arrived in the city […]

By Kennedy Maize At a pleasant Christmas dinner with friends last week, a smart diner posed a question: when should the government or the market have known that the U.S. (and the world’s, as it turns out) financial system was in life-threatening peril? After pausing to scratch my head, I proffered an idea: it all […]

By Kennedy Maize Some of my friends on the left have been lamenting the Cabinet choices of president-elect Barack Obama. One of them wrote in an email recently, “As the new government was put together, brick by brick, a disturbing pattern emerged. Time and again, those who had braved the perils of the Clinton… threat […]

By Kennedy Maize Here’s an interesting new wrinkle on wind power, from a researcher at the University of Illinois. According to Somnath Baidya Roy, turbulence from large wind farms can harm growth of crops in the local countryside. Baidya Roy notes that in recent years, wind power has moved from small, isolated turbines to large […]

By Kennedy Maize The Obama administration has picked Steven Chu, currently the director of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be secretary of energy. The selection was quite a surprise, as Chu’s name had not surfaced in any of the rumors circulating in Washington. Indeed, he’s not well know in Washington political […]

By Kennedy Maize It’s time for the latest round of the name game, this time focusing on who President Elect Obama will pick to head the Department of Energy. Clearly, the the DOE pick is a second-level decision, after economics and national security. In fact, DOE really doesn’t have much to do with energy. Around […]

By Kennedy Maize Shades of Tommy Gold. The U.S. Geological Survey this week said it has concluded that there are vast “technically recoverable” methane hydrate reserves trapped in the Arctic coastal plain that could provide some 85.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, a significant addition to U.S. natural gas reserves. Gas hydrates, also known […]

By Kennedy Maize Nothing fails like success. Already, Democrats in Congress are at each others’ throats about sharing the spoils from the Obama victory. The most serious fight so far pits Hollywood liberal Henry Waxman against the long-time chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Democrat John Dingell of Michigan. Waxman has launched a […]