The Quad Report

By Kennedy Maize The North American Electric Reliability Council told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission yesterday (Feb. 19) that the high-voltage electric transmission system in major parts of the U.S. and Canada faces serious, long-term threats to reliability. Briefing FERC, NERC’s John Moura, director of reliability assessment, said the 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment report “is … More NERC calls for long-term reliability action now

By Kennedy Maize Michigan gas-and-electric utility Consumers Energy, a subsidiary of CMS Energy, is engaged in a complex and controversial dance as it attempts to spin off its entire fleet of 13 elderly hydroelectric projects to a private equity investor, which in turn might resell or shut the dams without state regulatory approval. The dams … More Michigan utility wants to unload its hydro

By Kennedy Maize President Trump last week (Feb. 11) ordered his government’s largest energy consumer — the Department of Defense, which he insistently and erroneously calls the “Department of War” — to look to domestic coal for its electricity needs in the future. At the same time, the nation’s largest public electric utility — the … More For Trump, TVA, it’s back to the future with coal

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?