A proposed federal environmental and energy permitting rule by a White House agency could scuttle a separate but related energy permitting deal negotiated earlier this year by President Biden and congressional Republicans. The Council on Environmental Quality, part of the Executive Office of the President, on July 31 published its “Phase 2” of a rulemaking … More White House-House GOP Permitting Dispute Erupts
The U.S. Department of Energy isn’t doing enough to help electric utilities face potential shortages of large power transformers (LPTs), which could jeopardize reliability of the nation’s high-voltage transmission grid, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. GAO is the Congressional watchdog agency that reviews executive branch agency performance. In its August … More GAO Examines Big Transformer Issues, DOE Response
The massive, bipartisan Senate’s “National Defense Authorization Act” includes major changes to the regulation of civilian nuclear power by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy, including a 20-year extension of the controversial Price-Anderson insurance subsidy for nuclear power plants. The Senate DOD bill, which passed 86-11, includes the entire “Accelerating Deployment … More Senate DOD Money Bill Includes Extended Price-Anderson Civilian Nuke Subsidy
In what could be its most significant action in the last 20 years, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last Thursday (July 27) ordered a revolution in how new electric generation and storage can apply to get onto the transmission grid. The new approach to streamline grid interconnection — Order 2023 – (order nomenclature at FERC … More FERC Revolutionizes Grid Interconnection Process
A familiar, ubiquitous, even mundane technology – underground pipelines – could be the show stopper for the Biden administration’s ambitious plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fueled electric power plants. Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency is counting on carbon capture and sequestration – pulling the CO2 out of the flue gas and burying it in … More Pipelines a CCS Bottleneck?
The Biden administration is moving to increase fees for onshore oil and gas leasing on federal land, updating policies that date back to the 1950s. The move, published as a proposed rule in the July 24 Federal Register, is certain to lead to a furious assault from oil and gas industry. In its proposal, the … More Biden BLM Moves to Reform Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing
A predictable, cyclical, celestial event could strike the Earth this year or next, possibly eclipsing climate change, Ukraine, or the upcoming presidential campaign for damage and drama, at least in the short term. The scientific moniker is “coronal mass ejections” or, predictably, CMEs. For laymen, call it “solar flares” or “solar storms.” In our acronym-addicted … More The Great Solar Storm of 2024?
Natural gas – often touted by the gas industry and its supporters for its reliability – failed miserably during the 2022 Christmas weekend Winter Storm Elliott in the nation’s largest wholesale electricity market, PJM, and “tested the reliability of much of the Eastern Interconnection.” The failure also cast doubts on PJM’s important capacity market, designed … More PJM’s Elliott Autopsy: Natural Gas Failed, Capacity Market Stumbled
Russian Explosion. An explosion of some sort at a large Russian uranium enrichment plant in the Urals last wseek has reportedly killed one worker, although details are sparse and state-owned nuclear monopoly Rosatom is playing down the event. The first account, from the now all-digital magazine Newsweek, was somewhat breathless. “More than 100 people have … More Euro Nuke Notes: Russian Explosion, Hot Water, Zaporizhzhia, UK SMR Game
The Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to aggressively reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fueled electric power plants over the next 20 years, based on the authorities in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. For many observers, the EPA plan proposes technological prestidigitation, pre-and-post combustion. Post-combustion control is carbon capture and sequestration from flue … More Biden’s Big, Risky Energy Bets Part 2: Low Greenhouse Gas Hydrogen