Despite the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s unanimous vote to terminate the cockamamie 2017 Trump administration’s proposed rulemaking to “rescue” the coal industry, based on a flawed definition of “reliability,” the commission announced on Monday it will take a detailed look at the issue of power system reliability in the context of the Texas weather debacle. … More FERC addresses Texas, without much prospect for change

Rich Glick, the Biden administration’s new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, has been wielding his gavel with gusto in the first month of his tenure as head of the agency. Democrat Glick, who has been a member of the commission since November 2017, demonstrated at the FERC monthly (virtual) public meeting Thursday (Feb. … More Glick’s gavel galvanizes FERC activism

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

Cutting carbon emissions to net of zero by 2050, a goal of the Biden administration, is feasible, according to a new study by the National Academies of Sciences, but also has significant payoffs for the nation. “Because of dramatic decreases in the costs of renewable electricity and batteries, the U.S. can now — during the … More NAS: Net zero CO2 emissions have benefits beyond climate impacts

As the Biden administration revives serious discussion of global warming after four years of studies inattention during the Trump administration, the issue of the “social cost of carbon” is at the forefront again. This rather arcane economic concept lies at the heart of determining public policy options for dealing with the impact of a changing … More Discount rates and the social cost of carbon

The largest electric utility bribery scandal in U.S. history appears to be nearing an end, as officials of the phony Ohio nonprofit Generation Now, a bogus organization created by Akron-based utility FirstEnergy and key Ohio Republican legislators to subsidize two of the utility’s uneconomic power plants, have pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges. In a … More Utility bribery rundown: Ohio racketeering conviction, Illinois kingmaker ousted

Is ammonia (NH3) to key to making hydrogen a useful transportation fuel and a replacement fuel in fossil-fired power plants? Hydrogen is also ideal for use in electrochemical fuel cells. Ammonia and hydrogen, both together and separate, have been getting a lot of buzz lately. The international bank HSBC recently predicted that ammonia produced from … More How does ammonia fit into a hydrogen energy regime?

Does putting a price on carbon, long advocated by many economists, result in reduce emissions of carbon dioxide? A new paper accepted for publication by the prestigious journal Environmental Research Letters casts doubt on that economic assumption. The peer-review paper by Jessica F. Green, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, … More Two academic studies address the utility of pricing carbon emissions

Naming Democrats to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and a key staffer at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Biden administration has move quickly to solidify it power over energy and environment regulatory bodies. Biden promoted Rich Glick at FERC, which was not a surprise. The January FERC meeting was the … More Biden rolls out key energy and environment appointments

After 40 years of effort and over $3 billion in government funds, the Department of Energy still has no end in sight for the cleanup of the abandoned West Valley, N.Y., plutonium reprocessing site, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. The congressional watchdog agency said DOE “cannot estimate the cleanup’s final cost until … More GAO: West Valley plutonium cleanup stalled