transmission lines

30Mar

Burying the Lede, and Responsible Energy Policy

A new study designed to show that a future in Texas without coal is within reach in fact shows just the opposite. Like other studies and models before it, renewable boosters have an interesting propensity to bury the lede. In this case, a study about Texas’ vast wind and solar potential in fact highlights one […]
23Feb

The Reliability Crisis Reaches a New Gear

A new consensus is building that electricity grid reliability problems are in fact very real and very serious. That may not be news to anyone who has been paying attention. There have been countless warnings that something is very wrong but, for years, many of the warnings and some of the loudest voices making them […]
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 […]
17Nov

No One Wants the Grid of Tomorrow in their Backyard

With overwhelming evidence accumulating from Texas and California, New England and Europe, it’s becoming evident that dispatchable fuel diversity and robust capacity reserve margins are essential to navigating the energy transition. Even as real-life challenges abound, these cornerstones of reliability and affordability are disappearing in grids across the U.S. States and utilities continue to dismantle, […]
16Dec

Modelling the Impossible

“It’s technically possible,” is not the type of a response you want to hear from any expert. It’s the kind of response you get when something is brutally impossible but the person delivering the news wants to soften the blow. A new study from researchers at Princeton charting what’s needed to achieve net-zero U.S. emissions […]
10Nov

Stumbling Over Transmission

The cost of wind and solar power may be falling but building the transmission infrastructure to send power across the country – perhaps the key piece of the renewable puzzle – has only gotten more difficult and more expensive. A reality now playing out in both the U.S. and Europe. Germany’s attempt to pivot to […]
30Jan

A Failure to Connect the Dots

The U.S. has a growing energy infrastructure problem. More precisely, major transmission lines needed to move wind and solar power from regions of production to centers of demand aren’t being built at nearly the pace needed. Natural gas pipeline additions are also failing to keep up with gas demand. One infrastructure project after another is […]
19Sep

Addressing the Epidemic

Wholesale electricity markets are coming undone. They have been compromised by an ever-expanding accumulation of state mandates and subsidies that have turned any semblance of traditional competition on its head. What began as modest state policies initially intended to give emerging variable resources a jumpstart have now become an epidemic. Instead of just a nudge […]
07Aug

When Down is Up

The reduction in the price of electricity from solar and wind power over the last decade has made for a fantastic story. But it’s hiding a more complex and troubling truth. While the price of generating power from renewables has fallen, the cost, or burden, of integrating these intermittent sources of power onto the grid […]
14Mar

A Solution in Search of a Problem

It’s not uncommon to hear calls for rebuilding and transforming the electricity grid. In fact, renewable energy boosters say transforming the grid is an imperative if the nation is to reach their goal of 100 percent wind and solar power. But this call for transformation exposes some of the underlying problems with the proposed wind […]