Blog

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 […]
27Jun

Rebalance the Electricity Marketplace

For those opposed to government intervention to ensure grid reliability, the rallying cry has sounded something like: “How dare you interfere in the free market?” What free energy market are these critics talking about? As Hollman Jenkins Jr. recently observed in The Wall Street Journal, “Energy decisions are already highly politicized.” He continues, “That’s the […]
20Jun

It’s Past Time to Align Energy Policy with Energy Reality

Coal’s much-publicized decline isn’t a decline at all. Coal plant retirements in the U.S. and some parts of Europe have created a narrative that coal is in irreversible global retreat. The data tell a different story. The oil and gas giant BP’s recently released annual Statistical Review of World Energy offers an important reality check […]
13Jun

The World is More Uncertain Than You Think

Nobel Laurette Daniel Kahneman, the author of the best-selling Thinking, Fast and Slow, offered some sage advice to investment professionals at the CFA Institute’s recent annual conference. According to the institute’s blog, Kahneman said: “When something happens, you immediately understand how it happens. You immediately have a story and an explanation. You have that sense […]