Blog

12Sep

California’s Regressive Lab Experiment

Responsible governance is defined differently in California. Governor Jerry Brown has signed an executive order for the state to slash its overall emissions to zero by 2045 and then go negative, meaning that in 2046 the state will have to start pulling more emissions from the atmosphere than it puts in. As a compliment to […]
05Sep

An Alternate Reality

The ongoing debate in the U.S. over the future of coal seems to exist in an alternate reality. While we fight over everything from market distortions to the permitting of coal export terminals, the majority of the world is embracing coal, building more modern, far more efficient plants than our own. Coal isn’t a problem […]
31Aug

How About Now?

Like a snowball tumbling downhill, the reliability crisis is only picking up steam. Despite the continuous and ever-louder warnings that we are quickly approaching a point of no return, regulators and grid operators have brushed aside concerns and spoken in platitudes about protecting a free market that is anything but free. Just how much longer […]
22Aug

From Illegal Overreach to Thoughtful Restraint

The Obama administration’s environmental agenda can be neatly summed up by the word “overreach.” No order from the administration better defined this overreach than the Clean Power Plan (CPP), better known as the Costly Power Plan. It was nothing if not ambitious. With one stroke, President Obama’s EPA shrugged off 45 years of legal interpretation […]
15Aug

Perspective and Optimism

Appreciating the optimism that now permeates the coal industry requires a little history. After all, context matters. Rewind to 2011, the year the Mine Health and Safety Administration (MHSA) reported a highwater mark of 143,940 coal miners. Just five years later, by the close of 2016, there were just 81,875 of those miners left employed. […]
08Aug

An Outsized Impact

Coal miners hold a special place in America’s collective consciousness. For years, writers and pundits have tried to identify the reason for coal mining’s importance in the American imagination and American politics. Theories abound. Maybe it’s fascination with work done underground in an atmosphere so foreign from most of today’s over-air-conditioned workplaces? Maybe it’s because […]
01Aug

Educated in New England

New England: great schools, lovely foliage, terrible energy policy. New England’s self-imposed energy woes should be a warning to the rest of the country. Are we paying attention? New England is an energy-intensive place to live (the winters are no joke), and energy bills show it. Poor policy choices have burdened consumers with some of […]
25Jul

It Will Cost How Much to Do Nothing?

The unfolding crisis of baseload retirements has been well documented in this space. Despite gathering warnings from the engine room, the grid has managed to rearrange the proverbial deck chairs to make it at least appear that all is well even as our tanker takes on ever-increasing amounts of water. However, the loss of more […]
18Jul

The EVs Are Coming

Those who claim there is no need for intervention to support baseload power plants often point to flat electricity demand as the basis of their reasoning. And to their point, utility electricity demand has been flat for a decade. Gains in energy efficiency and the outsourcing of heavy industry have contributed to this. But their […]
11Jul

One Retirement Too Many

Summer is here in all its sun-drenched glory. There’s a pretty good chance you’ve been swimming, seen some fireworks or had some watermelon. Perhaps it’s having both fireworks and watermelon on the mind, but reading about stress on the electric grid, falling reserve margins and blackouts in California jogged memories of the internet sensation that […]