electric utilities
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Do we need nuclear and coal plants for baseload power?
On Friday, Matt Yglesias made the point that only socialist state control seems capable of creating a robust nuclear power industry. After all, the only countries building nuke plants these days are the ones where governments are making the decisions. David Frum replied with a series of wildly overbroad assertions ranging from false to highly […]
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Why it’s better to invest in efficiency than to hold electricity rates down
Joe Romm draws attention to some extremely interesting thoughts from Glenn English, head of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. NRECA represents 900-plus small, not-for-profit, typically coal-based utilities in the Midwest. We tend to think all coal utilities are after more free allowance allocations under a cap-and-trade system, but as Climate Wire (sub req) reports, […]
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How CBO budget scoring devalues efficiency … WITH PUPPIES!
The Congressional Budget Office is back in the news, after director Doug Elmendorf testified before Congress about the economic impacts of clean energy legislation. Opponents of that legislation rushed to hype a few of his comments out of context, and succeeded, as usual, in getting their voices amplified in the Washington Post. Elmendorf didn’t say […]
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What to do with the utility handouts in the climate bill?
Passage of the Waxman-Markey bill through the House was a shock to the Beltway. Rahm Emanuel himself called its architects after the floor vote to express his surprise and admiration — and if anyone knows how to count votes, it’s Rahm Emanuel. One compromise more than any other enabled the bill to navigate the sticky […]
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Why the Second Circuit ‘nuisance’ case brings good news, and bad (part II)
Cross-posted from Warming Law. In an earlier post, we explored the background, context, and historical significance of the Second Circuit decision handed down late Monday in Connecticut v. AEP, in which the court ruled that a group of states and environmental groups could sue several major electric utilities for contributing to a “public nuisance” in […]
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Corporations call off the old green battle, but Chamber of Commerce soldiers on [UPDATED]
Update: This story keeps growing. Since last week… The country’s largest utility, Exelon, said it was quitting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest of the group’s climate-bill opposition. New Mexico utility PNM Resources did the same. Nike, the most public-facing Chamber defector to date, said it would leave the Chamber board of directors while […]
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Solar Power, Yes We Did! (& Will!)
The outlook for all three categories of solar power in the United States is bright, according to a new study by the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC). The IREC reports that photovoltaic (PV) capacity grew by 63 percent in 2008 alone. The study’s author, Larry Sherwood, credits the federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC) for a […]
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How fast can the U.S. electric sector reform?
Is the electric sector capable of rapid, large scale reform? Many policies implicitly assume the answer to that question is No, especially when it comes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emission control. The result is a policy conversation that hinges on the assumption that it is hard to change. How much must we spend to accelerate […]
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The faint silver lining of the Waxman-Markey clean-energy-mandates cloud
The Waxman-Markey bill would require that 20% of the nation’s power supply come from clean energy (15%) and efficiency (5%) by 2020. But wouldn’t the U.S. have reached those mild targets without any government intervention, through natural market growth? Would the bill’s mandates have any effect at all? A spate of recent analyses have argued […]
