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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 […]