By Kennedy Maize With seed money from Wyoming, Basin Electric Power Cooperative, North Dakota’s multistate generation and transmission cooperative, is pondering a new coal-fired power plant in the Cowboy State. Under consideration is a second unit at the 483-MW Dry Fork unit near Gillette, 93% owned by Basin, with the Wyoming Municipal Power Agency owning … More Is it back to the future for Wyoming coal power?
By Kennedy Maize Last week (Oct. 24), the state-owned South Carolina Public Service Authority, universally known as Santee Cooper, picked New York’s Brookfield Asset Management (BAM:NYSE) for negotiations over buying the remains of the public power system’s massively failed V.C. Summer nuclear project to bring it back to life. Santee Cooper and investor-owned Scana Corp. … More Will South Carolina host the night of the nuclear living dead?
By Kennedy Maize The Department of Energy has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to federalize and streamline the connection of large data centers to the interstate transmission grid. DOE last week (Oct. 23) sent FERC a 16-page draft notice of proposed rule making, asking the commission to enact the new, unprecedented rule by the … More DOE wants FERC to take over large data center grid connections
By Kennedy Maize “Plethora, noun, pleth·o·ra ˈple-thə-rə: an ample amount or number: abundance, profusion … Grand Cayman offers a plethora of bustling restaurants, ritzy resorts and comfortable condos …—Susanne Cummings … a world whose credibility is threatened by the meaningless plethora of material goods it goes on producing.” That definition from the venerable Merriam-Webster fits the circumstances behind what has been occurring for … More How to track the rise and possible fall of the SMR empire
By Kennedy Maize Donald Trump’s seemingly visceral hatred of offshore wind is well known. He’s also opposed to terrestrial wind projects. Less noticed: It turns out Trump’s wind ire has strange partisan implications. Trump’s hatred of offshore wind dates to 2011 when he objected to a planned offshore project as he was developing a major … More The partisan punches in Trump’s wind power policies
By Kennedy Maize The Trump administration’s latest attempt to sell federal “clean, beautiful coal,” has again failed to find a buyer, this time in Utah. It’s the third Interior Department western coal lease flop this month. Other October Bureau of Land Management coal sales collapsed in Montana and Wyoming. Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation announced last … More Trump coal leasing program hits repeated brick walls
By Kennedy Maize The U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday (Oct. 14) refused to hear an appeal from a tiny West Virgina coal company to a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruling in favor of a large natural gas company. It’s a dispute over whether mining on the coal company’s land could endanger a Columbia Gas Transmission Co.’s … More SCOTUS, D.C. Circuit hand FERC wins and a loss
By Henry Sokolski The whispering campaign against the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), an international pact that aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, has begun. Several US officials recently asked me, “What good is the NPT?” The developing world uses it to gang up on us to push disarmament. China and Russia use it to argue against forward-deploying American nuclear weapons. … More Guest Commentary: Should the U.S. Walk Away from the NPT?
By Kennedy Maize President Trump professes to love coal and has expressed his ardor through executive orders, in his “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and through actions at the Departments of Energy and Interior. Given coal’s history over the past couple of decades, are those agency actions likely to make a significant difference in coal’s … More DOE, DOI push Trump’s “clean, beautiful coal” agenda
By Kennedy Maize In December of 1996, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, commenting on the effect of the “dot-com bubble” on the stock market, coined the term “irrational exuberance.” Some observers of the hype over an end to the decades-long doldrums of U.S. nuclear power are casting a gimlet eye at the claims. Could … More Alan Greenspan and the nuclear revival