30Jul

“It is actually here now”

“The reliability threat is not on the future horizon,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman (FERC) Mark Christie said last week. “It is actually here now.” Christie, who was overseeing his last FERC meeting before departing the commission, was responding to results from PJM’s recent capacity auction—an auction that for the first time came up short […]
24Jul

The AI Power Surge is Here and Coal is Essential to Meeting It

Big tech’s scramble to deploy ever-larger data centers to serve AI has become the electricity elephant in the room. Across the country, power demand is soaring, and data centers with the energy needs of entire cities – and even states – are driving the surge. Meeting this new demand will require new generation but also […]
16Jul

A Groundbreaking Sign of the Times

Last week, the nation’s eyes were on the groundbreaking of Ramaco Resources’ Brook Mine in northeastern Wyoming, the first new coal mine in the state in 50 years and the first new U.S. rare earth mine in 70 years. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Energy Secretary Chris Wright and the Wyoming delegation, Ramaco’s CEO Randy […]
08Jul

A Novel Idea: Fact-based Energy Policy

The Department of Energy (DOE) is finally doing something almost unheard of in government in recent years: policymaking based on reality and facts. This week, DOE released a new “Resource Adequacy Report,” evaluating the reliability and security of the U.S. grid. The report is a direct response to President Trump’s Executive Order, “Strengthening the Reliability […]
02Jul

Happy American Energy Independence Day

Energy abundance. Energy security. Energy independence. As we approach July 4th, our Independence Day, it’s worth taking a moment to recognize the leap forward the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) provides to boosting American energy production and reversing the damaging legacy left by the prior administration. In the closing months of the Biden administration, the […]
25Jun

Will the Power Keep Flowing?

What a week for congressional attention on grid reliability. A brutal heatwave is pushing the supply of power to its very limit in grids stretching across much of the country. Outages have already hit parts of New York City, while the PJM Interconnection and Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) grids have both issued “maximum generation […]
18Jun

Global Context Matters

When it comes to energy, coal production and use, China is in a league of its own. China generated over 10,000 terawatt hours of electricity in 2024. That’s more than the combined output of the U.S., E.U. and India—the next three biggest producers. China’s electricity production has skyrocketed. Remarkably, as recently as 2010, the U.S. […]
11Jun

Aligning Energy and Regulatory Policy with the AI Moment

It has become hard to overstate the impact AI and data centers are having on the power sector. This is an industrial revolution on an extraordinary scale. At a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) conference on grid reliability last week, regulators and grid operators once again sounded the alarm over the challenges they collectively face […]
04Jun

Racing to Cover Capacity Shortfalls

Need more evidence we’re in a power supply emergency? Look no further than how the nation’s grid operators are scrambling to fast-track interconnection of new dispatchable resources that can shore up eroding reliability. From the Great Plains to New York, operators are frantically trying to revise interconnection processes to get new generation added to grids […]
28May

A Grid Emergency in MISO

Well, that didn’t take long. Before the boiling heat of summer has even officially arrived, the lights went out in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) region. More than 100,000 customers in and around New Orleans went without power for most of the day on Sunday when MISO was forced to order rotating outages in […]