By Kennedy Maize A DOGE desperado has dug in at DOE. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has replaced his original chief of staff, Alex Fitzsimmons, with a veteran of Elon Musk’s extra-legal Department of Energy Efficiency and former software entrepreneur Carl Coe. According to a DOE news release, Fitzsimmons will take over as head of the … More D.C. tidbits: DOE follies, Palisades hearing, planet Trump

By Kennedy Maize Early last month, AP reported, Microsoft Corp. announced it has put a billion-dollar data center project in Ohio on hold, including turning over two of three sites in Licking County outside of Columbus to agricultural use. In December, Microsoft pulled the plug on future phases of a $3 billion data center in … More Is AI data center disastrous electric demand hyped?

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?