By Kennedy Maize Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has turned thumbs down on small modular reactor enthusiasm in The Grand Canyon State. The Democratic governor has vetoed a bill the Republican legislature passed to ease the path for SMRs to supply power to data centers and other large industrial users. The legislation would have waived several… More Atomic merry-go-round: Arizona, Louisiana, Texas
By Kennedy Maize During President Trump’s so-far feckless attempt to broker a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia (he’s really not very good at making deals and he didn’t write the book), Trump suggested that the U.S. could take over, maybe even own, the contested and seriously damaged Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. In a White… More Trump’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear nonsense
By Henry Sokolski This Saturday (Apr. 26), Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, will meet Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi to flesh out the details of a nuclear deal. They will have to focus on two questions. First, what kind of agreement, if any, might prevent Iran from getting a bomb. Second, can… More Guest Commentary: Will an Iran deal make nuclear proliferation great again?
By Kennedy Maize Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho are making preliminary moves that could split up investor-owned PacifiCorp, based in Portland, Ore., and owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. PacifiCorp has two operating subsidiaries, Pacific Power, located in Portland, serving Oregon, northern California, and southeastern Washington, and Rocky Mountain Power, located in Salt Lake City. Rocky… More Western states consider forming electric utility, ousting PacifiCorp
By Kennedy Maize The Trump administration’s shoot from the hip approach to governance has suffered more foot wounds at the hands of the U.S. courts. A federal district court judge in Washington last week (Apr. 15) reversed EPA’s order to freeze $27 billion in funds allocated last year under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to… More How the Trump EPA’s discarded ‘gold bars’ turned to fool’s gold
By Kennedy Maize A Britishism – “gobsmacked” – characterizes much of the reaction to President Trump’s April 9 executive order that attempts to impose supermarket pull-dates on energy regulations. It is titled the “Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting to Unleash American Energy” order. “Unlawful and destructive,” says Clint Vince, the esteemed head of the energy practice at the… More Does Trump’s “zero based regulatory budgeting” make any sense?
By Kennedy Maize The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last week (Apr. 19) refused to reverse a November decision killing a plan for an Amazon data center to snuggle up next to Talen Energy’s 2500-MW Susquehanna nuclear plant. The Pennsylvania data center would have gobbled up 480-MW of the plant’s capacity. The original proposal came in… More Data center siting circus continues
By Kennedy Maize President Trump’s strange lust to acquire Greenland, the world’s largest island, sparsely populated and part of Denmark, is largely unaccompanied by any notion of just what America might do with this frozen land. According to Reuters, billionaire tech mogul and PayPal founder Peter Thiel and some of his tech cronies have a… More Trump’s Greenland: Micro nukes, high-speed rail, and anarcho-capitalism?
By Kennedy Maize President Trump last week issued four of his many, often meaningless, executive orders, these aimed at rejuvenating the declining U.S. coal industry. He said his goal is “reinvigorating America’s beautiful, clean coal industry.” Taken together, it seems that Trump drew his policy initiatives entirely from his Office of Management and Budget and… More Trump on coal: Dig, baby, dig; burn, baby, burn; die, miners, die
By Dan Yurman The Department of Energy (DOE) last week (Apr. 3) announced a plan to boost U.S. artificial intelligence efforts and lower energy costs by co-locating data centers and new energy infrastructure at up to 16 DOE sites. There are multiple problems with DOE’s plan. The first is that complex and lengthy federal site… More Guest Commentary: DOE data center plans, DOGE firings don’t mix