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IT IS BREATHTAKING HOW EASILY MANY now say, “This is the worst economic crisis since the Depression.” The Depression remade America. It spawned the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, transforming the business landscape occupied by electric and natural gas utilities. It led to the construction of towering federal hydroelectric dams in the West, and brought electrification to the poorest...
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Nuclear Breakthroughs Sought
NATIONAL RESEARCHERS ARE WORKING diligently to advance all forms of energy production. While they are focused on science and technology, politics pervades their efforts.The laboratories all point to nuclear energy's viability as a fuel source, saying that future reactors will be safer, more cost effective and highly efficient. That will give nuclear energy a regulatory advantage and therefore...
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Powering Up Renewable Energy Research and Development
NEVER IN OUR COUNTRY'S HISTORY HAVE energy efficiency and renewable energy played more vital roles than they do today. Renewable energy has become a national priority, with leaders from government and industry acknowledging that the United States must wean itself from an oil addiction that threatens not only our national security but also our environment and our economy. There is no single...
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Federal Budget Could Provide Signal
AS THE NEW YEAR BEGINS, THE FATE OF THE YUCCA MOUNTAIN nuclear repository project in Nevada remains as murky as ever. It was only in September that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepted the licensing application for Yucca Mountain, mandated in 2002 legislation, and docketed it, opening the formal process for licensing. But the NRC now has three to four years before it has to come to a...
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Utilities Take Cover
WITH BIG-TIME TROUBLE pounding at the door of the economy, you have to wonder about the fate of America's power companies. They are among the most capital-intensive industries at a time when the credit wellsprings of business have all but dried up. To learn more about the impact of unprecedented financial turmoil on utilities, EnergyBiz recently conducted a roundtable discussion with five...
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T. Boone Pickens on Energy
T. Boone Pickens is a billionaire on a mission to rein in America's strategic vulnerability caused by its dependence on imported oil. Recently, he has been spending a share of his personal fortune trying to educate Americans about the dimensions of the problem and force the hand of political leaders to address it. At the same time, he is developing the largest wind generation projects in the...
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Forbes on Energy
Noted business journalist and one-time presidential candidate Steve Forbes has an informed opinion about most of the most pressing issues of the day — including energy. Recently, his Forbes magazine hosted a conference on ways to intelligently shape the $20 trillion in investment energy companies will make in hardware and technologies in the next 20 years. In turn, consumers and business will pay...
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Healthy Balance Sheets Today
There's one class of company that won't be lining up with a hand out for help from the troubled asset-relief program. Electric utilities have enough free cash flow to keep their balance sheets healthy for the foreseeable future, and electric utility executives can sleep nights knowing their prudence in the last eight years has served them well in the financial crisis, debt-rating agencies...
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The Appeal of Mine-Mouth Power
Perhaps the largest coal-fired power plant now under construction, the 1,600-mega- watt Prairie State Energy Campus in down- state Illinois might become a model for other successful build-outs as the electrical industry negotiates the green transition.Early on in the Bush administration, Peabody Energy, the largest public coal-mining company in the world, decided that one way to increase its...
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Here Come Renewable Energy Zones
If the new administration wants to jumpstart investments in renewable energy, it can look west for examples of how to encourage new wind, solar and geothermal energy.Texas, California, Colorado and Minnesota are all in various stages of initiating the construction of new transmission lines to areas they have dubbed as renewable energy zones where new renewable generation is expected. Texas is...
