Tag Archives: renewable energy

Can Energy Jobs Lead The Way?

In a nationally broadcast speech last week, President Obama announced his $447 billion American Jobs Act plan. Unlike prior speeches, he didn’t mention clean-energy jobs once, but if you read between the lines, there are areas where the sector could gain.
Putting that aside for a moment, it is also worth noting President Obama’s decision to [...]

Brownouts on the Way?

by Mike Mulvihill

Great news! New EPA regulations coming down the pike will force many utilities to reduce emissions. The bad news? These same regs could cause us to lose as much as 7 percent of the nation’s electricity generation pretty quickly.
The E.P.A. estimates its rule on air toxins and mercury expected out in November will [...]

The $29 Million Battery

By Mike Mulvihill
This is not a NASA toilet seat story. (There’s no fun in whipping up on NASA any more.) This is about West Virginia, coal central for the Eastern U.S., which has cleared the way for AES (the nation’s second largest energy company) to construct a 32 MW electric storage device to provide [...]

Word Play Politicizes Energy

by Mike Mulvihill
An excellent blog post Sunday by Kate Galbraith in the New York Times (Word Choice Matters for Energy Policy) points out the depth of our nation’s political obfuscation on energy policy.
Ms. Galbraith points out that when President Barack Obama speaks about the fuels of the future; his term of choice is usually “clean [...]

Celebrating $22 a gallon gas!

by Mike Mulvihill

Whoopee! A blog post by Inhabitat – Green Design Will Save the World is celebrating independent consulting firm Ernst & Young’s release of a report yesterday predicting the price of solar energy per watt is expected to fall to $1 by 2013, down from $2 in 2009. The report, prepared for the Solar [...]

Nuclear Mashup

 
by Mike Mulvihill
Here’s a nuclear reality mashup. On Saturday, Japanese, Chinese and Korean leaders gathered near the Fukushima nuclear plant to munch on tomatoes and cucumbers in an effort to assure all that agricultural products from Japan are safe.  (Oh, and they may have had a political agenda to set the stage to increase their [...]

Energy and The Economy – Inextricably Intertwined

By Mike Mulvihill

Fortune magazine released its annual list of the nation’s 500 largest publicly traded companies last week and it speaks volumes about how hard it will be to move our economy away from fossil fuels. Of the top five companies, three were oil companies (Exxon #2, Chevron #3 and Conoco Phillips #4) and two [...]

The Pale of Fukushima

By Mike Mulvihill

While most of the actions taken at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami have been sound, the situation is still in doubt. The primary problem continues to be an inability to get power to pumps to keep nuclear materials covered in water necessary to prevent further [...]

Fukushima Is No Chernobyl

By Mike Mulvihill

The massive earthquake and tsunami that have devastated Japan also rocked the nuclear power world. Powerful explosions at two of three nuclear reactors at Fukushima have generated much media coverage suggesting comparisons to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl (see photo), by far the world’s worst nuclear accident affecting a 30 km radius around [...]

“I Can’t Stand This Indecision…

By Mike Mulvihill

 
…married with a lack of vision.” Ah, I often recall these lyrics from popular Tears for Fear song, Everybody Wants to Rule the World (1985) when I think of government
In last Tuesday’s Buzz Bin, I lamented that Congress was likely to gut the Obama administration budget that contained more than $3 billion to [...]