Department of Energy (DOE)

04Feb

Reinforcing Winter Grid Reliability

The weather predicting skills of a certain groundhog remain up for debate, but Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this week and, sure enough, the brutal cold is sticking around.   Eastern states are likely to face frigid temperatures for much of February as the polar vortex pushes arctic air south. The forecasters at AccuWeather say to […]
26Jan

Thank Heaven for Coal and Sound Energy Policy

The Wall Street Journal hit the nail on the head this weekend in an editorial titled “Thank Heaven for Coal Power in the Cold.” Winter storm Fern has wreaked havoc across a 2,000-mile stretch of the country leaving hundreds of thousands without power. If not for coal generation, it would be millions more. Electricity grids […]
21Jan

The Affordability Crisis Is a Reliability Crisis

Soaring electricity prices have become a top-tier political issue and will remain so through midterms and likely far longer.  That was underscored last week when the Trump administration hosted several state governors from PJM Interconnection territory, the nation’s largest electricity market, to urge the grid operator to hold an emergency capacity auction for data center […]
29Oct

Reliability is a “Five-Alarm Fire”

Rising electricity prices and their impact on the economy and ballot box have become front page issues. However, the nation’s teetering grid reliability is the crisis we must not ignore. With power demand surging, and utilities struggling to get new infrastructure and dispatchable generation onto the grid, alarm over the state of the nation’s power […]
01Oct

Coal’s Moment

This may be hard to digest for some, but the United States needs to ramp up both coal production and coal powered generation. As the coal fleet quietly and repeatedly proves itself to be a critically important tool to address eroding grid reliability during times of maximum demand, it’s past time to recognize the value […]
06Aug

J.H. Campbell Comes to the Rescue in MISO

When Secretary of Energy Chris Wright used emergency authority to extend the life of the J.H Campbell coal plant in Michigan at the end of May, the decision was met with a broadside of a criticism. To the anti-coal crowd, the move was a bail out, a solution in search of a problem and a […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]