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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 […]