The Quad Report

By Kennedy Maize The Trump administration’s Interior Department April 17 took steps to add and redistribute water in the drought-stricken Colorado River system, largely aimed at protecting hydro-electric generation from Lake Powell behind the Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Meade behind Hoover Dam. Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation is ordering a major withdrawal of water from … More Interior orders a short-term Colorado River fix

By Kennedy Maize A group of nine Midwestern and Southern electric utilities, facing the prospect of demand for increased high-voltage transmission, are asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (EL-26-58-000) to render a key provision of long-standing commission Order 1000 — competition in new electric transmission projects — a dead letter. Calling themselves the “grid acceleration … More Transmission competition challenge faces FERC

By Kennedy Maize Gen. Arbitrary and Dr. Capricious have again derailed the Trump administration’s declared war against renewable energy. The day before April 22nd’s Earth Day anniversary, Judge Denise J. Casper, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, granted a preliminary injunction halting the Interior Department and Army Corps of … More Court hands Trump another loss on renewables

By Kennedy Maize Roll over, Tom Edison; tell Nikola the news: DC current is cruisin’ down the wires. You lose. Sometime this spring, the 339-mile, 400kV Champlain Hudson Power Express (HPE), a high voltage-direct current underground and underwater transmission line is set to begin delivering 1,250-MW of hydro and wind power from Quebec to New … More The AC v DC race is on again and DC is gaining

By Kennedy Maize As the federal government dithers over imposing conditions on the allocation of Colorado River water in seven states, Mexico, and multiple Indian tribes, the region is gripped by fear, uncertainty, doubt, and numerous homemade schemes ranging from the difficult to the preposterous. With a crisis that has been well understood for over … More The Perils of Pauline:* Colorado River crisis continues

By Kennedy Maize The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Wednesday (April 15) dropped a billion dollar hammer on a North Carolina firm for what the commission said was “energy efficiency fraud” in the PJM and MISO regional transmission organizations. The commission ordered American Efficient LLC to pay a $722 million fine and disgorge $410 million … More FERC hammers “Money-for-Nothing”

By Kennedy Maize Coal was once king of the U.S. electric generating hill, despite the many problems with the dusky diamonds. Nukes surged in the ‘70s, but never caught coal. Natural gas made a move in the 1980s, the period of the short-liven “gas bubble” when federal prices controls got lifted.The bubble deflated and coal … More Is dashing to gas the wrong move?

By Kennedy Maize The Trump administration so reveres what the president calls “America’s beautiful clean coal,” that it is proposing to weaken Environmental Protection Agency rules on disposing of the dirtiest part of what is an indubitably dirty fuel: the toxic ash coal leaves behind when burned. On April 9, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency … More EPA proposes a regulatory rollback on coal ash management

By Kennedy Maize Trump’s confusing “war of bad choice” against Iran has produced vivid unavoidable, anti-Trump display ads all across the country — EXXON: $4.20.9, Shell: $4.18.9, BP:$4.21.9; Crown:$4.09.9–and so it goes in terms of the political damage. But where the economic rubber actually hits the road is getting less overt attention: diesel fuel. University … More Trump’s war makes the case for electric big rigs

By Kennedy Maize Literally hot new environmental issues — water stress, heat islands, and type of power supply — are emerging as giant data centers proliferate. A new report from international consultancy Wood Mackenzie finds that water stress — the availability of water for cooling industrial processes — is “becoming a strategic constraint for energy … More New problems emerge as big data centers spread