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
Rich Glick, the Biden administration’s new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, has been wielding his gavel with gusto in the first month of his tenure as head of the agency. Democrat Glick, who has been a member of the commission since November 2017, demonstrated at the FERC monthly (virtual) public meeting Thursday (Feb. … More Glick’s gavel galvanizes FERC activism
Fully understanding the details about what went wrong with the Texas power supply system won’t be possible for weeks, and will no doubt involve investigations from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and its private sector partner, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. But having covered the U.S. electric system as a specialized journalist for over … More Some thoughts about Texas
Cutting carbon emissions to net of zero by 2050, a goal of the Biden administration, is feasible, according to a new study by the National Academies of Sciences, but also has significant payoffs for the nation. “Because of dramatic decreases in the costs of renewable electricity and batteries, the U.S. can now — during the … More NAS: Net zero CO2 emissions have benefits beyond climate impacts
As the Biden administration revives serious discussion of global warming after four years of studies inattention during the Trump administration, the issue of the “social cost of carbon” is at the forefront again. This rather arcane economic concept lies at the heart of determining public policy options for dealing with the impact of a changing … More Discount rates and the social cost of carbon
The largest electric utility bribery scandal in U.S. history appears to be nearing an end, as officials of the phony Ohio nonprofit Generation Now, a bogus organization created by Akron-based utility FirstEnergy and key Ohio Republican legislators to subsidize two of the utility’s uneconomic power plants, have pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges. In a … More Utility bribery rundown: Ohio racketeering conviction, Illinois kingmaker ousted