General

By Kennedy Maize Washington, April 2, 2010 — Greenpeace doesn’t like cloud computing. The out-on-the-edge environmental group also doesn’t much care for Apple’s upcoming IPad computer platform, which adds to the data content of the cloud. Why is this? Because the data cloud, and its associated applications such as the IPad, dwell on server islands […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, March 25, 2010 — Hype in the energy world has long history, going back to many generations of perpetual motion machines and the like (cold fusion for example). Nuclear hype is one of the most presistent forms, from electricity “too cheap to meter,” to atomic-powered bombers, to cars with nuclear-powered engines, […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, March 22. 2010 — Remember all that hype about a nuclear renaissance? Push it all a couple of years into the future, as the economy has caused growth in demand for electricity to slow considerably, making the need for new baseload capacity less pressing. In a wire service interview, Marvin Fertel, […]

Dennis the Menace Takes on Obama Nuke Support By Kennedy Maize Washington, March 19, 2010 — The Obama administration’s decision to offer some $8.3 billion in loan guarantees to the Southern Company for a new, two-unit expansion at its Vogtle nuclear power station in Georgia is drawing fire from the Democratic left in Congress. Rep. […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, March 11, 2010 — As reported in POWER NEWS, the Obama administration has formally pulled the plug on the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, project to store spent commercial reactor fuel, the latest in more than a 50-year record of failure on the part of the federal government to fashion a way to […]

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 […]