The Quad Report

By Kennedy Maize In a little-noticed move last month (Jan. 5), the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit in California to overturn functionally dead ordinances of two cities, Morgan Hill (population 45,483) and Petaluma (population 59,776), that forbade natural gas appliances in new buildings, effectively making them “all electric.” It’s an issue that goes back … More DOJ sues to overturn California cities’ bans on gas appliances

By Kennedy Maize A nine-year-old, massive utility bribery scandal in Ohio, which has so far sent a prominent Republican legislator to jail, indicted a former state utility regulator — now deceased — of accepting bribes, and sullied state politicians, utility officials, and industry lobbyists across the Buckeye State, may be coming to an end. The … More A long-running utility criminal scandal comes to an end?

By Kennedy Maize The Trump administration’s determination to lean into coal, including preventing any existing coal-fired power plants from shutting down, economics be damned, is getting pushback from the folks immediately impacted: coal-burning electric utilities. The utilities charge that keeping old, inefficient coal-fired plants running hurts their customers in the pocketbook and the companies on … More Industry strikes back at Trump’s coalphilia

By Henry Sokolski Once again, the Trump administration and its latest National Defense Strategy failed to mention the spread of nuclear weapons or proliferation. This follows a similar omission in its 2025 National Security Strategy. This is disappointing, but hardly surprising.   Although the United States has previously maintained fairly tough nonproliferation policies, for the … More Guest Commentary: America Needs a Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy…Again

By Kennedy Maize In 1972 Congress created the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). In 2026 the Federal Advisory Committee Act dope slapped Energy Secretary Chris Wright upside the head for creating a secret, illegal advisory committee to tell him what he wanted to hear about climate change. Last year, Wright assembled a group of five … More DOE’s climate warming FACA fiasco

By Kennedy Maize The Environmental Protection Agency has issued new air emission standards for oxides of nitrogen (NOx) from new utility-scale gas-fired turbines. They ratchet emissions down from the existing levels set in 2006, but are far less stringent than a proposal launched at the end of the Biden administration in 2024. After EPA enacted … More EPA’s New NOx power plant emissions rule

By Kennedy Maize Here’s a simple, even obvious, solution to the threat that data centers pose to the nation’s high-voltage interstate electric transmission grid, but once would have been anathema: get the data centers off the grid. The rise of massive, gigawatt-scale data centers rivaling the electric consumption of entire cities, along with enormous, consumptive … More Unleashing data centers from the grid?

By Kennedy Maize Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has called the governors of the seven states that comprise the troubled Colorado River Compact to Washington for a January 30 meeting to hash out a compromise. All but one will appear. Only California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom won’t appear, citing a long-standing family commitment. He’s sending Wade … More DOI summons Colorado River Compact governors to D.C.

By Kennedy Maize The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last week (Jan. 22) issued a 40-year license to the Goldendale energy project to build and run a 1.2-GW closed-loop hydroelectric pumped storage plant in south-central Washington state’s Klickitat County. The site is about two miles north of the Columbia River, which separates Washington and Oregon.  According … More FERC OKs big new hydro pumped storage project

By Kennedy Maize Confusion and skepticism are trending over the Trump administration’s plan to radically intervene in the way the giant PJM Interconnection buys electricity to supply distribution utilities in order to aid power-gobbling data centers. Skepticism is in the lead. Just as various analysts were teasing out the details and implications of the administration’s … More Scoping out Trump’s PJM data center auction plan