By Kennedy Maize The Trump administration’s implicit “coal’s costs don’t count” policy advances. The Department of Energy has expanded its assault on electric consumers in the upper Midwest in order to keep a dead coal plant walking. The Environmental Protection Agency has kicked a hazardous and toxic coal ash can down the road to beyond … More In Trumplandia where coal is king, DOE and EPA genuflect
By Kennedy Maize Last July, President Trump announced he had reached a massive trade deal with Japan that would lower the tariffs he had imposed on the country. In return, Japan would, among other concessions, make a “massive” $550 billion investment in the U.S., although the details were sketchy. In September, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick … More Donald J. Trump and the artifice of the deal
By Kennedy Maize Most of the headlines at the end of the United Nation’s 30th “Conference of the Parties” to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Belem, Brazil, to address global warming and climate change were similar. They highlighted COP30’s studied lack of jeremiads against fossil fuels in the conference report. The … More COP30 ends, not with a bang but a whimper
By Kennedy Maize Baltimore-based Constellation Energy is dueling in Annapolis with its estranged, erstwhile parent, Chicago-based Exelon Corp., over building new electric generation and storage in the “land of pleasant living,” (a slogan coined in the 1960s by a Baltimore brewery). The two energy giants are wrangling over the possibility of new generation needed in … More Generational dispute roils Maryland
By Kennedy Maize The western electricity landscape looks like it is moving toward a long-anticipated future as a west-wide regional transmission operator. It’s led by California and the state legislature’s seminal passage in September of legislation, AB 25, that created the framework, based on the California Independent System Operator’s (CAISO) Western Energy Imbalance Market. According … More Western ISO finally headed toward reality?
By Kennedy Maize The Trump administration’s latest Department of Energy move to centralize and federalize the U.S. electricity system is drawing fire, including from important FERC veterans, Republicans and Democrats alike. At the end of October, DOE told the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to issue a draft order giving FERC the ability to order … More DOE data center fast track plan draws fire
By Kennedy Maize What would a nuclear power boom to rival that of the 1970s mean for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Will the agency need to go on a hiring spree to cope with the onslaught of new regulatory business? Or would the Trump administration’s zeal for eliminating government jobs, and its plans for … More NRC future: growth, decline, or both?
By Henry Sokolski If growing tensions in the Indo-Pacific weren’t alarming enough, a recent round of nuclear provocations has only salted the wound. On Oct. 29, U.S. President Donald Trump pledged to resume nuclear-weapons testing, taking leaders in the region by surprise. Then, on Nov. 5, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow will follow Trump’s … More Guest Commentary: Japan should resist the temptation to go nuclear
By Kennedy Maize The nation’s largest offshore wind project, two-thirds complete off the Virginia shore with $8.2 billion spent, is facing new challenges, political and financial. In both cases, one source of the new risks is Donald Trump. The political risks are that the president may turn his irrational hatred of offshore wind to the … More Will Trump’s gale force sink the nation’s largest offshore wind project?
By Kennedy Maize Another disappointing earnings report from NuScale Power’s (NYSE:SMR) last week (Nov. 6) led to a sharp decline in the company’s stock. At the same time, another shift in the status of Fluor Corp.’s (NYSE:FLR) shares in NuScale hiked the price of the Texas engineering and construction giant’s shares. NuScale’s third quarter … More NuScale Power’s stock shocked after bad 3rd quarter