Blog

By Kennedy Maize This is so California. The all-powerful California Air Resources Board, which drives regulations affecting cars, power plants, and virtually anything with moving parts in the state, has ordered a new study of the health effects of diesel engine emissions,  after it turned out that a staff member who did the analysis leading […]

By Kennedy Maize Is Jeff Immelt, General Electric CEO, headed out the door at the enormous conglomerate he took over from “Neutron” Jack Welch in 2001? As GE continues to deliver lackluster business performance, and as Immelt continues to focus on what appear to me to be peripheral business targets, I’d suggest his days are […]

By Kennedy Maize Energy Secretary Steven Chu can’t serve two masters, only one: the White House. Chu is going learn that truth, in an ongoing battle between DOE and the Office of Management and Budget. Predictably, the showdown between the entrenched bureaucracy and industrial interests that Chu serves daily and the political administration he serves […]

By Kennedy Maize The alleged U.S. “nuclear renaissance” has been slowing creeping toward the horizon of reality for over five years. Developers have filed plans at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Department of Energy has dangled $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for new nukes, although so far it’s just financial foreplay. The nuclear industry […]

By Kennedy Maize Some additional damaging brush strokes on “Climategate,” these related to statistical analysis and peer review. When the story of the climate emails surfaced, and the apologists insisted that there was nothing behind the alleged doctoring of evidence, I first thought about the NAS review of the Mann “hockey stick” representation. It was […]

By Kennedy Maize Plug-in hybrid electric cars? Phooey. They don’t make economic sense.  They don’t represent “green” technology. But they do help the electric utility industry, which has been pushing them hard for a decade, as a way to get some load and revenue from power that otherwise would be dumped. Now, my curmudgeonly view […]

By Kennedy Maize Having just returned from three weeks of vacation, where I paid no attention to power issues, here are some items I’ve discovered since my return. I hope my take will spark some conversations. First, “Climategate.” This flap of major proportions, threatening to unravel the alleged scientific consensus behind global warming, blew up […]

By Kennedy Maize WASHINGTON, Nov. 19, 2009 — This blog has highlighted my concerns about the security of the smart grid for many months. Now, there’s a new potential problem with the smart grid: privacy. Washington Post technology security writer Brian Krebs, in a recent posting, notes that “privacy experts are warning that the so-called […]

By Kennedy Maize WASHINGTON, Nov. 16, 2009 — Call it “kick the can.” The Obama administration, according to the New York Times, has persuaded (does than mean big-footed?) the rest of the world attending the upcoming Copenhagen climate change confab to adopt a policy duck. It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and […]

By Kennedy Maize I come not to praise Yucca Mountain as a final repository for spent nuclear fuel, but to bury it. The lid on the Yucca coffin has long been in place, but now the Obama administration is  nailing it down, according to a report in The Energy Daily. That’s good news. The newsletter […]