General

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., June 26, 2012 – Pardon my déjà vu, but an article in Monday’s Washington Post, citing a study of how the Interior Department’s coal leasing program in the Powder River Basin is mismanaged, takes me back 30 years. The study by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis claims […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., June 25, 2012 – When it comes to electric infrastructure, no state is more dysfunctional than California. That observation, based on many years of observing the twists and turns of California electricity policy, is highlighted by the problems the state now faces with the possibility of the San Onofre nuclear […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., June 17, 2012 — If the Obama administration is, as Republicans charge, the most anti-business administration in U.S. history, why is it doing everything it can to save publicly-traded uranium enrichment enterprise USEC from itself? Could Ohio have something to do with it? We are shocked, shocked, as shocked as […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., June 12, 2012 – It’s hard to cry the blues for a union worker at a nuclear power plant making $122,000 a year with a good health plan and a solid 401(k). That’s the situation of the average striking (or locked out, if you will) member of Local 369 of […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 3 June 2012 — An international effort is underway to give control and governance of the Internet to a United Nations agency, with implications for ways that U.S. utilities might implement smart grid technologies. Led by Russia and China, the plan to turn the Internet over to the International Telecommunications […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 5 May 2012 — A Federal Energy Regulatory Commission financial audit finds that the North American Electric Reliability Corp. is failing to focus its work on the new, mandatory electric grid reliability powers Congress gave it in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Instead, says the FERC staff audit released May […]

By Thomas W. Overton, JD The news blogosphere was briefly contorted earlier this week by a study published in Nature Climate Change that appeared (to some laymen, at least) to suggest that large-scale wind farms were contributing to global warming. Naturally, given the intersection of several hot-button issues (renewable energy and climate change), and the […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 28 April 2012 — A vexing problem faces those who advocate massive global political and economic responses to a warming climate allegedly marred by mankind’s insatiable appetite for goods and services that produce carbon dioxide. The data to justify climatastrophism are mighty thin. As Woody Guthrie put it in a […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 19 April 2012 — Advice to NRC commissioner Kristine Svinicki: it’s time to start polishing that resume. Your days on the regulatory commission are over. The term of Republican Svinicki, who led an unsuccessful attempted regicide of NRC chairman Greg Jaczko last year, expires June 30. Under the law, the […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., 16 April 2012 — So clever of the White House. President Obama says his administration’s latest energy strategy — mimicking his GOP adversaries — is “all of the above.” This is the “welcome ever more trotters into the trough” approach. And most everybody who makes energy loves the free lunch. […]