General

By Kennedy Maize Since we first moved to rural America in 1972, I’ve wanted a bucket truck. What a useful tool. Tree trimming, gutter cleaning, roof repairs, high-altitude carpentry, painting. The list of uses is probably endless. But I’ve never actually plunked down the dollars necessary for a bucket truck, even a used model. Never […]

By Kennedy Maize The slim passage in late June of the House Democrats’ global warming bill – 219-212 – reminds old-timers of the Clinton administration’s passage of a Btu tax in 1993 by a 219-213 vote in the House, only to see it crater in the Senate. Is the same result likely for the Obama […]

By Kennedy Maize Here’s further evidence why I believe the current smart grid hoopla is bogus, and North America should be focusing on a strong grid instead. I live on a small farm in rural Maryland, some 60 miles northwest of Washington, D.C. My electric company is Allegheny Power, a distribution subsidiary of Allegheny Energy, […]

By Kennedy Maize After almost unrelenting hype, skepticism about plug-in hybrid cars is beginning to emerge in the mainstream media. It’s a good thing, as much about the much-ballyhooed vehicles, particularly the General Motors Chevy Volt, doesn’t withstand serious business or technical scrutiny. In early June, Jim Motavalli at the “Wheels” blog at the New […]

By Kennedy Maize Remember the nuclear power renaissance coming any day soon now? Fugetaboudit. While the stars seemed aligned for new nuclear power in the U.S. in 2005 when Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, it’s all turned brown and runny. The promise of some $15 billion in loan guarantees for new nukes in the […]

By Kennedy Maize As a democrat (that’s with a small “d” and a large “D”), I have a great deal of faith in the wisdom of the American people. That’s why I’m not surprised that the hysteria over alleged man-made global warming is in rapid decline in public opinion polls. It’s no longer in 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 […]

Jon Wellinghof, the latest chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is, by his own words, a doofus. As reported in Power News this week, Wellinghoff said the U.S. may never need new baseload electric generating capacity.  Why? Because wind will be so cheap it will get sent out first in an economic dispatch regime. […]

By Kennedy Maize The Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is declaring that carbon dioxide, a life-giving and ubiquitous atmospheric chemical, is a threat to public health. That’s a completely illogical determination, but also completely expected. The notion that carbon dioxide is a pollutant has nothing to do with chemistry or physics or biology or climatology, […]

By Kennedy Maize A report in the Wall Street Journal that Russian and Chinese spy hackers have penetrated the U.S. electric power grid, and left malware and root kits, cyber time bombs, to explode in the future strikes me as bogus. The story had no named sources, and the details were sketchy at best. Where […]