By Jeff Ryser | August 15, 2012 10:11 AM Comments (0)
I had the opportunity August 8 at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, to hear “the Big Dog” speak, which is what one of my editors in Washington calls former President Bill Clinton.
Clinton, at 26, and his then-girlfriend Hilary Rodham, spent time in Dallas and in Austin running George McGovern’s Texas campaign for president in 1972 when I was at the University of Texas.
By Kathy Larsen | August 7, 2012 01:28 PM Comments (0)
One budget buster is fabulous and fascinating: OMG, we have an apparently robust explorer on Mars, and we can see what it’s doing more than a hundred million miles from here. A hard-fought triumph of brilliance and doggedness. But some wonder if the
The other budget buster, at Mississippi Power’s Kemper plant, is minus the glamour, though some believe the integrated gasification combined-cycle project represents a strong opportunity to save coal as a major source of electricity. Here, too, some wonder–with real material effect–about the wisdom of spending money on it.
Both projects have had cost overruns. Both cost more than $2 billion: Curiosity around $2.5 billion and Kemper maybe about $2.9 billion.
By Peter Maloney | July 26, 2012 04:25 PM Comments (0)
Some Wall Street analysts were not very surprised by the announcement this week of the merger of two more merchant generators.
And they shouldn’t have been. There are only so many combinations possible when there are only four publicly traded merchant generation companies, and some of those combinations have already been tried.
By News Desk | July 26, 2012 11:30 AM Comments (0)
One of the challenges facing renewable energy growth in the
A Houston-based energy company says it has the answer: high-voltage direct current lines.
By Peter Maloney | June 29, 2012 03:54 PM Comments (0)
Some people would say that developers of renewable energy projects are optimists. A rosy outlook would certainly be helpful in an environment in which low natural gas prices are challenging the push toward the Holy Grail of renewable energy, reaching price parity with fossil fuel-fired generation.
That alone could be enough to dim the outlook of a US renewable energy developer, without the added concerns of a tighter banking climate brought about by more restrictive capital requirements and legislative gridlock over renewable incentives such as the production tax credit, which expires at the end of the year.
By Jeff Ryser | June 26, 2012 12:38 PM Comments (0)
The name Solyndra has a certain sizzle for those who happen to reside on one of the two ends of the political spectrum.
Very generally put, anti-renewable, right-leaning Republicans utter the name with a certain salaciousness as it connotes to them “crony capitalism.”
Left-leaning Democrats often blanch at the utterance of the name, but insist Solyndra–and its loss of $530 million in tax payer loans–was the cost of the government stimulating renewables needed to fight climate change.
By Kate Dourian | April 12, 2012 06:32 AM Comments (0)
Saudi Arabia, the world’s energy powerhouse, took a concrete step this week to try to reduce the amount of fuel it burns to generate electricity and desalinate sea water.
It completed a pilot project to use solar power instead of fuel for water desalination and plans to expand the use of solar-powered generators in an effort to curb domestic consumption of oil that could otherwise be exported.
By Kathy Larsen | April 3, 2012 07:08 AM Comments (0)
Lamentations Monday at Platts Global Power Markets conference about the lack of a national energy policy. There should be one. … Why can’t we just get it together and make one?. … Accept it, there never has been one and there never will be.
Benjamin Salisbury of FBR Capital Markets brought it all up short.
By Kathy Larsen | April 1, 2012 09:31 AM Comments (1)
Now that the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a regulation describing just what new coal and natural gas power plants must be like with respect to carbon dioxide emissions, one might think utilities and plant developers would have an easier time with long-range planning. The rule might deliver the certainty that executives always say they’re looking for.
But it’s not necessarily so.
By News Desk | December 20, 2011 11:19 AM Comments (0)
The Obama administration has made no secret of its support for renewable energy, but in the case of the offshore wind there’s a question of whether the administration has enough tools at its disposal to get the industry — which still doesn’t really exist in the US – off the ground.
A big part of the problem is that offshore wind, like most renewables, is a policy-dependant industry dealing with a dysfunctional Congress.
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