General

By Kennedy Maize Washington, Feb. 15, 2010 — Local opponents of wind farm developments often claim that the energy projects depress their property values. It’s a difficult issue to settle. The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory claimed last December in a $500,000 study, three years in the works – “The Impact of Wind […]

By Kennedy Maize Here at my western Maryland farm, we just got the fourth significant snowfall of the winter. We caught four inches while we were on vacation in the South Pacific in late November, over 20 inches on December 20, six inches a few days ago, and four inches last night (Feb. 2). The […]

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 […]

By Kennedy Maize President Obama in late October announced that the Department of Energy would award $3.4 billion in grants to allegedly “smart grid” technologies. As I parse the awards, my reaction is that they are fundamentally stupid. Most of the money – to be matched by the private sector (those matches presumably are tax deductible […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington,  OCTOBER 21, 2009 — With prospects for a new international agreement on climate change (Kyoto II) in Copenhagen in December faltering, environmentalists in the U.S. may be facing a Hobson’s choice with the climate-energy legislation now before the U.S. Congress. The choice may be to agree to drilling for oil and […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, OCTOBER 23, 2009 — The Obama administration is moving to get the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission fully staffed, naming two Democrats, MIT nuclear scientist George Apostolakis and former Clinton administration Department of Energy nuclear chief Bill Magwood, to the commission That fills two vacancies on the five-member commission. At the same […]

By Kennedy Maize For those of us who follow the ever-contentious global warming debate, one of the key areas of conflict is the recent climate record. Is the globe warming, cooling, or just puttering along. It’s a game that depends on where you start and how you aggregate the data. Each side accuses the other […]

By Kennedy Maize In the words of shade-tree philosopher and New York Yankee Hall-of-Fame catcher Yogi Berra, “It’s deja vu all over again.” The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio has put on hold a plan by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. to send out compact fluorescent light bulbs to its customers, unbidden, and bill them for 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 […]

By Kennedy Maize In journalism, we call it “burying the lead.” That’s what the New York Times did in a Sept. 25 story headlined “Build a Better Bulb for a $10 Million Prize.” The story said that the U.S. Department of Energy is prepared to pay $10 million for development of an efficient, cost-effective replacement […]

By Kennedy Maize Oh! ye’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road, And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye– Old Scottish folk ballad When it comes to climate legislation, the Obama administration has chosen the low road – administrative action by the Environmental Protection Agency. At the same time, the administration is […]

By Kennedy Maize In 1979, researcher Renate Kimbrough of the Centers for Disease Control, part of the Department of Health Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services), shocked the electrical world with an epidemiological study. She found that GE employees from the transformer works at Schenectady, N.Y., exposed to high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls […]

By Kennedy Maize A few environmental myths about electric power just won’t die. I’ll begin to discuss some of them in this blog. The first is that exposure to electrical and magnetic fields from high-voltage power lines causes cancer. This long-shot-down claim resurfaces repeatedly. It is simply wrong, and multiple scientific studies – including a […]

By Kennedy Maize This blog has nothing to do with energy or power.  It’s about music. But I suspect that there are enough readers out there who will connect with it to make the blog worthwhile. I’m writing about the death on Sept. 16 of Mary Travers, 72, the dominant force of the folk group […]

By Kennedy Maize Partisan Correctness: Does Harry Reid Speak for Harry Reid? Who’s speaking approximate truth here? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said this week in a press conference that he expects energy and climate legislation, which has narrowly passed the House, will get punted into next year. The reason, Reid said, is the […]

By Kennedy Maize Companies that offer health insurance plans to their employees – and that covers most power companies – need to pay close attention to the Washington debate on national health insurance plans now current in Congress. So far, most of the sound and fury over the Obama (and congressional) plans are bogus, kicked […]

By Kennedy Maize Look out, the political wobbles are beginning for Senate climate legislation. The wheels could come off anytime soon now. The Energy Daily reported that the Senate’s schedule for taking up climate legislation won’t begin on Sept. 8, as originally announced. Instead, said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Environment and […]

By Kennedy Maize Bobby Hefner, the doyen of deep gas, is back on the energy policy scene in a big way. That’s the only way Hefner has ever wanted to be seen: on a big canvas. Back in the 1980s, Hefner’s Oklahoma-based GHK company was the prophet of natural gas finds way down below where […]

By Kennedy Maize There’s a new debate developing about the politics of  cap’n’trade v. health care: can the administration pass both health care legislation and climate legislation?  Alternatively, would failure of the administration’s health care initiative, whatever it ultimately looks like, make passage of energy legislation more likely? The proposition that health care defeat will […]

By Kennedy Maize God, I love global warming. This spring and summer has been the coolest and wettest since we moved to our current western Maryland farm 20 years ago. My pastures are lush with clover, and we took our lambs to the butcher six-to-eight weeks earlier than normal. We raise 99% grass-fed lambs (a […]

By Kennedy Maize I’ve been reading a lot lately about “geoengineering,” aka “climate engineering,” as a way to deal with global warming, instead of a cumbersome, bureaucratic international command-and-control regime, or a cap-and-trade mechanism. This is intriguing. I suspect this engineering approach is another policy dead end, but it is worth contemplating and discussing. Ultimately, […]