More fallout from the failed Ohio nuclear bailout legislation. FirstEnergy, the utility that lobbied furiously for House Bill 6 to keep uneconomic Davis-Besse and Perry nuclear plants operating at the expense of Ohio customers, says it won’t disgorge $30 million collected so far under the subsidy.   The legislation passed after Akron-based FirstEnergy allegedly used … More Ohio nuclear bailout: a roundup of regulatory, legislative and death developments

Advanced nuclear power technologies based on designs that are not light-water reactors are not an improvement on LWR machines and may be worse, according to a detailed analysis in a new 140-page report from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Edwin Lyman, a PhD nuclear physicist and head of the UCS nuclear power program at UCS, … More UCS report critiques non-LWR advanced nuclear proposals

San Antonio Texas’s city-owned energy utility, CPS Energy, has sued the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), charging that the grid operator during the February deep freeze charged it “excessive, illegitimate and illegal prices.” The utility filed the suit in Bexar County District Court. CPS Energy CEO Paula Gold-Williams said, “During a state declared disaster, … More San Antonio muni sues ERCOT over freeze charges

The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), testifying in Congress this week, pointed directly at the natural gas industry in Texas for a major share of blame for the February rolling electricity blackouts. It’s an issue that economists have earlier raised. NERC CEO James Robb March 11 told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, … More NERC points to role of gas in Texas freeze

NRRI, the National Regulatory Research Institute, an arm of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, finds a series of regulatory failures that exacerbated the Texas grid collapse. The work by NRRI economists Carl Pechman and Elliott Nethercut concludes, echoing earlier analyses of failures of the Texas regulatory system: “The Texas [Public Utilities Commission] and … More How Texas failed the February freeze

Who and what to blame for the February electric grid freeze in the Lone Star State? The Electric Reliability Council of Texas? The state public utility commission? The generators who haven’t winterized their plants? Too much wind power? The autarky of the Texas electric grid? The deregulation of the Texas electric grid? No electric generation … More Texas freeze: blame natural gas markets?

For fusion energy enthusiasts, hope seems to spring eternal each spring, as the Congressional money machine begins to gear up. That evergreen story holds true again this year, as reported in Science magazine on Feb. 19. The magazine article relied on a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, calling, no surprise here, for … More Is tritium the roadblock to fusion energy?

New Jersey-based Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG, formerly Public Service Electric and Gas) says it is on pace to unload all of its substantial non-nuclear generation, leaving it as a wholly nuclear generating company. In its 2020 earnings statement Feb. 26, CEO Ralph Izzo touted his company’s strategy “to become primarily a regulated utility with … More PSEG to sell fossil and solar generation, concentrating on nukes

Chicago-based Exelon Corp., the largest vertically integrated investor-owned utility in the U.S., on Tuesday (Feb. 24) announced a divorce. The company said it will spin off its generating assets, primarily the largest nuclear fleet in the country, into a stand-alone, publicly traded enterprise, with the token name of “SpinCo,” while retaining its multi-state regulated transmission … More Divorce: Exelon to split generation from transmission and distribution

Despite the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s unanimous vote to terminate the cockamamie 2017 Trump administration’s proposed rulemaking to “rescue” the coal industry, based on a flawed definition of “reliability,” the commission announced on Monday it will take a detailed look at the issue of power system reliability in the context of the Texas weather debacle. … More FERC addresses Texas, without much prospect for change