Will sodium displace lithium as the key to high-density, long-lasting batteries to power smart phones, electric vehicles, and turn intermittent solar and wind power into dispatchable electricity? Are iron-air batteries heavyweights aimed at becoming serious contenders for the battery energy storage crown? Lithium’s strength is known. It is a muscular lightweight, the lightest metal on… More Look out Li, Na and Fe want to beat your butt

The U.S. Interior Department has shut down the planned 804-MW Vineyard 1 wind project operating and under construction in federal waters some 15 miles off Nantucket Island. The order came after a blade on one of the 13-MW wind turbines shattered on July 17 spreading debris, some of which washed up on beaches on the… More Interior shuts down large Mass. offshore wind farm after blade failure

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has stomped down two separate, nearly identical coal-fired utility challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency’s long-running rules on cleaning up coal ash ponds. In a ruling June 28, the three-judge panel rejected a claim from the utilities that somehow groundwater and rainfall are different and the EPA’s 2015 coal… More Coal ash: Water, water everywhere, not all alike?

As a sometimes historian of the U.S. infatuation with nuclear power, military and civilian, I thought I had come across most of the bizarre tales of nuclear things gone wrong: Idaho’s SL1 death machine; the atomic powered bomber to nowhere; the flightless Kiwi at Jackass Flats; Edward Teller’s atomic earth blaster project disingenuously named “Plowshare;”… More The cold sad tale of “Nukey Poo”

Virginia-based investor-owned utility Dominion Energy wants to become the first in the nation to switch on a trendy small modular nuclear reactor, despite the absence of significant details about what this nuclear unicorn might look like. The company’s electric customers are going to pay in advance for the blank-slate SMR. Last week (July 10), Virginia’s… More An SMR miscellany: Dominion, EDF, Britian, Biden

The long fallout from the fall of Enron’s illegal electricity market manipulations early this century continues. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Tuesday (July 9) overturned a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission refund order to sellers of electricity during an August-September 2020 California heat wave. FERC ordered the refunds to distribution utilities based on California Independent… More Disgraced Enron’s criminal electrical tentacles continue to entwine California

Harsh reality is again clashing with the fanciful hype of the past several years about fusion energy. The only credible attempt to harness the physics of the sun — ITER (Latin for “the path” and originally the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) — has again pushed back the date when it will attempt a sustained fusion reaction… More “Fusion propaganda” meets on-the-ground reality

The impacts of breaching the Lower Snake River hydro dams are on the agenda of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Washington State Department of Ecology. The agencies held two public meetings June 25 and 27 under the rubric of the “Lower Snake River Water Supply Replacement Study.” The meetings are part of a… More Hydro you like this? A dam roundup

It didn’t take long. On Tuesday (July 2), the U.S. Supreme Court implemented its overturning of Chevron deference late last week by granting a petition for review of a D.C. Appeals Court decision – Edison Electric Institute et al. v. FERC 22-1246 – rejecting the court’s decision in favor of the regulators and sending the… More Chevron rejection bites FERC first

The U.S. Supreme Court last week by the now conventional 6-3, conservative v. liberal, margin tossed out the 40-year-old precedent on how courts should review disputes in cases before it involving interpretations of ambiguous technical laws Congress has passed. The latest reversal of precedent – which this court often honors more in the breach than… More Commentary: SCOTUS shows Chevron no deference