Politico

18May

A Plan to Break the Grid

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rolled out its sweeping new climate rule last week. In the plan’s crosshairs is the generating capacity that meets 60% of the nation’s power. Should the EPA get its way, today’s coal and gas fleets will be largely disassembled nearly overnight, posing a remarkable threat to a grid already […]
03May

FERC Stares Down the Reliability Crisis

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) sits right at the crossroads of the nation’s collapsing grid reliability and the increasingly disorderly energy transition. While FERC commissioners will be the first to tell you they don’t have the tiller for the nation’s energy policy, they do have a keen sense of whether the nation’s electricity markets […]
08Feb

The Country Needs Coal Too Mr. President

Call it an admission of pragmatism. While talking to the nation’s energy future last night during the State of the Union address, President Biden went off script and admitted that “we’re still going to need oil and gas for a while.” It was a statement of fact even if it made climate hawks grimace. What […]
07Nov

The President Doubles Down on Bad Policy

When President Biden boasted last week about closing coal plants all across the country, he meant it. The White House has already begun spinning and clarifying his remarks, but the President knew what he was saying because there’s a plan to do it. Even as electricity and natural gas bills soar – up a startling 16% […]
01Jun

Facing Grid Unreliability Reality

Summer heat has arrived and for too many families there’s deep concern over whether they can afford to stay cool or whether the grid is going to hold up when they need it most. With natural gas prices nearly three times what they were last year, electricity prices soaring and startling warnings about eroding grid […]
18May

As Natural Gas Prices Soar, a Plea for Energy Pragmatism

In the wake of stunning blackouts in California in August of 2020, California Assemblyman Jim Patterson said, “today we have a grid that is increasingly expensive, unreliable and unavailable when the people of California need it the most.” What Mr. Patterson didn’t know at the time is that his remark would soon describe nearly the […]
16Feb

Creating Our Own Energy Crisis

Perhaps the greatest challenge of the energy transition is timing the installation of the infrastructure and generating capacity required for our energy future in parallel with – or more quickly – than we are dismantling our current electricity mix and the affordability and reliability it underpins. Unfortunately, it’s a challenge policymakers either seem not to […]
19May

Here Come the Blackouts

We now know that the rolling blackouts that gripped California last summer weren’t an anomaly. They were, in fact, a preview of a reliability crisis that has grown to stretch across the Western grid. The Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) is warning that the West simply doesn’t have enough power supply to meet a region-wide […]