The Quad Report

By Henry Sokolski The world is entering a new era of nuclear proliferation. As alliance loyalties wane, hostile and friendly nuclear weapons proliferation is becoming more likely. As in the 1950s and 1960s, security analysts are increasingly worried about the prospect of nuclear use. To hedge against these concerns, Washington must bolster its overseas security … More Guest Commentary: Extended deterrence at a crossroads

By Kennedy Maize A multi-year battle at state and local levels over banning use of natural gas in individual stoves or for space and water heating in new buildings has flared up again in federal courts in California and New York. The cases have centered around parsing the terms of the federal 1975 Energy Conservation … More Electric v. gas legal warfare battles reignited

By Kennedy Maize In a massive, coordinated campaign, late last month (June 29) 196 local community groups and the attorneys general of eight states — Illinois, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Vermont — filed objections to the Environmental Protection Agency’s April proposal to roll back regulations on coal ash disposal from the … More AGs and community groups trash EPA’s coal ash retreat

By Kennedy Maize The U.S. Supreme Court on June 29 redefined the fundamentals of how the federal government works going back some 144 years and the creation of the now-defunct Interstate Commerce Commission, which regulated railroads. The court ruled 6-3 with the usual partisan divide that hitherto “independent” federal agencies are not independent. The president … More FERC, NRC and the slaughter of Humphrey’s Executor

By Kennedy Maize Fuel cells, a proven way to make electricity without combustion, fission, or gravity, are making serious inroads into the red-hot market for producing power for artificial intelligence data centers. Last Tuesday (June 30), fuel cell vendor Bloom Energy (NYSE:BE) announced what they described as a “$25 billion” deal with Canadian financial holding … More Fuel cells advance in the AI electric generation market

By Kennedy Maize SunZia lives. The 3.5-GW wind farm and associated 550-mile, 525-kV high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line began delivering power June 18 from its site in Torrance County in central New Mexico to the Palo Verde substation in central Arizona and further transmission to California. The $11 billion project consists of 674 GE … More Largest U.S. renewable energy project is online

By Kennedy Maize The Trump administration and its Department of Energy have made Canada, who many Americans other than Donald Trump consider our closest ally and good friend, happy. Last week (June 23), DOE’s loan office, renamed with disingenuous grandiosity the “Office of Energy Dominance Financing,” announced a $17.5 billion dollar loan program to subsidize … More Is Canada cleaning the U.S. nuclear power clock?

By Kennedy Maize Lake Powell, created by the flow of the Colorado River held back by the 1980 Glen Canyon Dam, could soon reach a water supply crisis, according to a new analysis by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation. The same outcome could then face Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead, downstream from Lake Powell. In … More Colorado River hydropower faces potential shutdowns

By Kennedy Maize A federal judge in Montana this month (June 12) killed some 1.5 million acres of oil and gas leases on federal land in Wyoming that the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued during the first Trump administration. The ruling also applied to some 185,000 acres of oil and gas leases … More Interior Department oil and gas leasing failures pile up

By Kennedy Maize Reactions to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s landmark action to streamline and coordinate the way artificial intelligence data centers connect to the interstate electric transmission grid are largely positive. Politico headlined its account of the FERC actions: “’Not the old sleepy agency’: Energy regulator dives into fight over data center connections,” The … More Scoping out reactions to FERC’s data centers grid connection action