Jim Pierobon is Founder and principal writer of The Energy Fix. He is a policy, marketing and social media strategist who has reported on, testified and consulted about smarter grids, cyber-security as it affects the power grid, fossil fuel shortages, price spikes, energy efficiency and the rise and fall -- and the rise again of nuclear and renewable energy sources.Petty politics defeats wind offshore Maryland. Can a third bid succeed? Will Gov. O’Malley even try?
“Petty political grudges” in Maryland’s Senate Finance Committee are to blame for the failure of the General Assembly to establish the mechanism to incent and pay for one of the first networks of offshore wind turbines anywhere off a U.S. coastline. That’s the way Chesapeake Climate Action Network Executive Director Mike Tidwell put it in [...]
Exelon’s bid for Constellation Energy: how real is the pledge to efficiency, EV’s and renewable energy in Maryland?
In the press release announcing its planned $7.9 billion acquisition of Baltimore, Maryland-based Constellation Energy, Chicago-based Exelon promised to spend $64 million over several years to spur energy efficiency, electric vehicle and renewable energy initiatives in Maryland. When pressed for details this week about one of the largest U.S. utility mergers ever, however, company spokesman [...]
It’s time for all utilities to buy electricity under power purchase agreements
Power purchase agreements – aka “PPAs” – are an established tool for spreading the cost of energy over 20 years or longer as a means of ensuring a revenue stream for renewable energy project developers, stabilizing and predicting energy costs and displacing dirty coal with cleaner sources of electricity. The time has come in just [...]
2 years later, TN coal ash debacle still a long way from real cleanup
Three days before Christmas in 2008, approximately 1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge near a federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in Kingston, Tennessee overwhelmed an 84-acre containment facility flooding a wide swath of the bucolic countryside. Two years later, it is very difficult for objective observers to envision how TVA will “make good” [...]