As 2022 comes to a close and, as usual, Congress squabbles over spending for the rest of the current fiscal year (ending Sept. 30, 2023), the electric utility industry is lobbying for funds to solve the problem of an acute shortage of distribution transformers. The dearth of transformers to step down current from utility distribution… More Transformers and the Congressional End Game
Joy Ditto, the savvy CEO of the American Public Power Association, keeps close track of what’s on the minds of her municipal utility members. And she reports in an editorial in The Hill last month, what’s on their minds is transformers. It’s a somewhat arcane corner of the U.S. supply chain problems that hasn’t made… More Archive, Nov. 7: Electrical Distribution Transformers in Short Supply
The massive earthquake that struck Japan on New Years Day, killing an estimated 200, also damaged one of the country’s nuclear power plants as the nation is still trying to recover from the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster. An earthquake and resulting tsunami, an enormous wall of sea water, crashed into the nuclear units and… More Japan’s earthquake response and the U.S. regulatory paradigm
The U.S. Department of Energy isn’t doing enough to help electric utilities face potential shortages of large power transformers (LPTs), which could jeopardize reliability of the nation’s high-voltage transmission grid, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. GAO is the Congressional watchdog agency that reviews executive branch agency performance. In its August… More GAO Examines Big Transformer Issues, DOE Response
A predictable, cyclical, celestial event could strike the Earth this year or next, possibly eclipsing climate change, Ukraine, or the upcoming presidential campaign for damage and drama, at least in the short term. The scientific moniker is “coronal mass ejections” or, predictably, CMEs. For laymen, call it “solar flares” or “solar storms.” In our acronym-addicted… More The Great Solar Storm of 2024?
“Befuddled” is the word American Public Power Association lobbyist Corry Marshall offers as his initial reaction to the Biden Administration’s Department of Energy proposal to increase energy efficiency standards for electric distribution transformers. For years, the electric utility industry, home builders, and transformer manufacturers have been highlighting a supply chain shortage of the transformers needed… More DOE’s Confusing Transformer Transactions
The fiscal year 2022 omnibus spending bill that Congress passed late last year before adjourning for the holidays, providing federal executive branch agencies some $1.5 trillion in funding through September 2023, contains a lot of money for energy programs. But it also causes heartburn among some electricity interests for what it does not contain. First,… More Energy Winners and Losers in the Omnibus Appropriations
Fully understanding the details about what went wrong with the Texas power supply system won’t be possible for weeks, and will no doubt involve investigations from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and its private sector partner, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. But having covered the U.S. electric system as a specialized journalist for over… More Some thoughts about Texas
President Trump May 1 issued an executive order concerning cyber security and the U.S. bulk electric supply system, which has gotten little attention in the general media. The order, published in the May 4 Federal Register, found that “foreign adversaries are increasingly creating and exploring vulnerabilities in the United States bulk-power system, which provides the… More Trump targets foreign electric equipment suppliers
Just when you thought the coronavirus was the harbinger of the apocalypse, here’s another knuckle-biter. The U.S. Geological Survey this week issued a new report on geomagnetic storms, finding that two-thirds of the contiguous U.S. coast-to-cost is vulnerable to power outages from the geomagnetic disruptions of solar storms, or solar coronal eruptions. USGS said, “Magnetic… More Coronavirus, meet solar storms