Blog

28Nov

The World Needs Affordable, Reliable Energy. Coal is Here to Stay.

The New York Times has once again discovered that the world needs coal. In a recent piece examining – or more accurately, demonizing – coal’s staying power, particularly in Asia, The Times gave a glancing and biased treatment of a selection of reasons big and small for why coal remains the world’s leading fuel for […]
21Nov

The Value of Balance

As an early snow fell on Washington last week, the east coast got a timely reminder of the value of fuel diversity. Despite U.S. natural gas production continuing to set records, U.S. natural gas prices spiked. The Financial Times reported that natural gas prices jumped 16 percent in one day – their biggest one-day gain […]
14Nov

The Chorus of Alarm Grows Louder

Fuel Security, like ball security for you football fans, is something you don’t think much about until you don’t have it. Unfortunately, the fuel security of the grid is no longer a sure thing. The loss of so much baseload power so fast is setting off a growing chorus of alarms. The latest voice to […]
07Nov

A Timely Reminder from Chairman Chatterjee

Despite the well-founded sense that the Clean Power Plan (CPP) is long gone, it remains a specter lurking just over the nation’s shoulder. The EPA’s proposed replacement rule, the Affordable Clean Energy rule, is just that, a proposal. Thoughtful, detailed work remains to get this welcome alternative over the finish line and ensure the Costly […]
01Nov

A Return to Reason…and the Law

Comments were due this week on EPA’s ACE rule – a welcome return to reason on the heels of its predecessor rule: the Obama administration’s “signature” anti-coal rule, the costly power plan (CPP). Replacing the CPP with ACE brings the EPA back into the realm of the legal, appropriately respecting the balance between state and […]
24Oct

The Big Data Power Surge

It may not have blast furnaces and assembly lines, those iconic symbols of heavy industry, but there’s a new energy-intensive industry rising right before our eyes and its growth could very well upend forecasts for future electricity demand. This new heavy industry – and the infrastructure to support it – is the data industry. As […]
17Oct

Embrace the Pragmatism of Low Emissions Coal Technology

In 2013, the World Bank Group decided to limit financial support for coal-fueled power plants to what it deemed “rare and exceptional circumstances.” It was a decision that almost immediately made perfect the enemy of the good and, as the World Coal Association (WCA) argues in a new report, has likely proved counterproductive to achieving […]
11Oct

Perspective on a Global Challenge

According to the U.N Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world must overhaul how it consumes and produces energy if global warming is to be slowed and eventually stopped. The IPCC’s proposed path forward would see the world all but drop fossil fuels by 2050. It’s a headscratcher. Nearly 80 percent of global energy […]
03Oct

Listen to This

This week, the EPA held a listening session on the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule – its proposed replacement for the prior administration’s costly Clean Power Plan (CPP). The message delivered by the National Mining Association (NMA) and others who care about the reliability and affordability of the grid was clear: the ACE rule is […]
26Sep

A Playbook on What Not to Do

The German Energiewende, or energy transition, was supposed to stir like a composition from Bach or Beethoven. Instead, it sounds like a fork stuck in a garbage disposal. When the Germans embarked on their grand pivot to renewable sources of power, they knew the effort was going to be costly but did they expect the […]