Blog

20Dec

What Could Go Wrong?

December 20, 2017 “I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern ship building has gone beyond that.” — Captain Edward John Smith, HMS Titanic “There is substantial evidence showing that …. outages caused by disruptions of fuel supply to generators appear to be virtually nonexistent.” — Joint letter to FERC from […]
15Dec

Green Demand, Dry Water

December 14, 2017 “Energy favoritism” is now a bona fide topic of Washington conversation. Where else would energy subsidies and government intervention become a heated topic at Christmas parties? But a topic it is, energized by two events.  First, House and Senate tax bills that may or may not reduce welfare payments to some energy […]
06Dec

Miner’s Day Becomes Miner’s Year

December 6, 2017 Seventeen years ago, Congress set Dec. 6 as National Miner’s Day, little knowing the renewed significance this date would have in 2017. A day that was born in recognition of a tragedy – the loss of 362 men in a coal mine accident in West Virginia in 1907 — has today become […]
30Nov

Science Dies in the Dark

November 30, 2017 During the last administration, serving in the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy was akin to tending bar during Prohibition.  There was often demand for a stiff drink, but teetotalers made sure that “alcoholic beverages” weren’t on offer. So it was with the fossil energy office at a time when coal […]
21Nov

Rhine Whine

November 21, 2017 Of all the column inches written from Bonn last week, New York Times reporter Brad Plumer (Nov. 18) may have underscored the biggest significance. German chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged that the developed world’s clean energy leader would likely fail to honor its ambitious emissions reduction pledge. There are at least two ways […]
15Nov

Chatterjee Strategy

November 15, 2017 What response to Energy Secretary Perry’s proposal can we expect from FERC by its Dec. 11 deadline? FERC Chairman Neil Chatterjee provided a clue if not an answer: he proposed throwing a temporary “lifeline” to some coal plants in danger of retirement until the commission completes a robust assessment of grid reliability […]
08Nov

NOPR and the Tax Bill

Nov. 8, 2017 Last week the renewable industry was busily excoriating Energy Secretary Perry’s NOPR for offering “subsidies” to coal when suddenly it had to defend subsidies – its own. Renewable advocates were stirred to indignation after House tax writers proposed cuts to wind and solar largess that totaled $7.2 billion last year alone. Measures […]
31Oct

A Ghostly Story

October 31, 2017 Here’s a scary thought for Halloween. Imagine you’re a well-paid Washington reporter covering, say, the environment and energy beat. You’ve reported on the colossal loss of coal jobs in Appalachia – more than 60,000 since 2010 [MISI consultants, Oct. 26] – and you wrote sympathetically about federal job training programs promised for […]
25Oct

Perry’s Angry Critics

October 25, 2017 It was the 17th century English playwright William Congreve who claimed “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Congreve never met the renewable fuels industry. Wind and solar proponents, feeling scorned by Energy Secretary Perry, reacted with righteous anger to his request that the Federal Energy Regulatory Corporation (FERC) allow utilities […]
18Oct

The Lesson from Luminant

October 18, 2017 Lately it seems that news, too, is in the eye of the beholder. The calamity brought by recent hurricanes – a calamity some greeted as evidence of climate change – was seen by others as evidence of grid vulnerability. Nature has become partisan. So it was last week. Reporters for the most […]