When the Biden administration in May rolled out its major plan to reduce CO2 emissions from electric power plants, the EPA concocted a way to keep legacy coal-fired plants in service – largely seen as a concession to the electric utility industry. The administration’s proposed coal plant rescue relies on carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). … More Biden’s Big, Risky Energy Bets Part 1: Carbon Capture and Sequestration

When it comes to electricity, California often gets highlighted as a case study of what can go wrong. The easiest example is the state’s high electricity prices. According to ChooseEnergy.com, the average Golden State retail electricity rate is 29.54 cents/kilowatt-hour, 46th highest in the nation. Hawaii is the highest, at 43.18 cents/KWh. Idaho and North … More California Electric Prices: The Highs and Lows

Uranium enrichment firm Urenco has announced it will expand its New Mexico plant – the only operating commercial enrichment operation in North America – by 15%. New cascades at the plant at Eunice, N.M., are scheduled to go into operation by 2025. The British-German-Dutch consortium said, “New commitments from US customers for non-Russian fuel underpin … More Urenco to Expand NM Uranium Enrichment Plant

The aging, under-sized and Balkanized U.S. high-voltage electric power grid has emerged as a significant bottleneck to greater development of necessary technology to meet the nation’s goals for greatly reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the electric power sector. The problem isn’t just this nation’s inability to build new transmission lines across state boundaries, when the … More Permitting Plagues Renewable Grid Connections

In a pro forma response to a congressional order, the Biden administration has issued a lukewarm report on the possibility of using solar geoengineering – reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth – to respond to global warming. The report — Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to Solar … More Geoengineering: There Goes the Sun, And It’s All Right?

Former Republican Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder is headed to the Big House. A federal judge June 29 sentenced Householder to 20 years in prison for his central role in a racketeering conviction involving a $1.3 billion legislative bailout (HB 6) of two FirstEnergy uneconomic nuclear power plants, which provided Householder about $60 million before … More Larry Householder’s New House

Capacity? Manufacturing cars is a complex process where supply chains can be critical. That’s true for electric vehicles, maybe even more so than for the long-established auto legacy companies. EVs have a particular vulnerability at a crucial point – batteries that make the cars go. The element lithium for the lithium-ion batteries is a key … More Lithium Lineup: Capacity, Silver Lithium State, Direct Extraction, Li No Fly

By Henry Sokolski For more than a year, nuclear experts have wrung their hands about the risk of radiological releases from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine and how best to prevent them. More than 15 months into the war, though, Russian attacks against Ukraine’s nuclear plants have released no radiation. This may … More Guest Commentary: War Gaming Civilian Nukes in War Zones

The multi-national, multi-billion-dollar, multi-decadal ITER fusion energy project has hit another snag, adding significantly to its estimated cost and time of arrival. Bloomberg reported June 22, “The world’s biggest fusion experiment involving 35 nations faces new delays and potentially billions of dollars in extra costs after defective pieces and broken supply chains disrupted the reactor’s … More Troubled ITER Fusion Project Faces Ever Bigger Problems

Wind and Sun Top Coal For the first five months of 2023, according to unreleased federal data obtained by E&E News and reported by Scientific American, solar and wind generated more U.S. electricity than coal. The data from the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration, which will be officially released later, showed that wind and … More Coal Patrol: Wind, Sun Top Coal, Utah Challenges EPA, Peabody Restarts Mine, Wyo. Wants Leasing