Lithium-Ion Lessons

Lithium-Ion Lessons

I bet you didn’t see or hear on your favorite news platform, whether it’s NPR, MSNBC, CNN, FNC, Axios, Facebook ????, the big three networks, or some dying newspaper platforms, that one of the largest lithium-ion electricity storage plants in the world caught fire and...
Rumblings of Utility Reregulation

Rumblings of Utility Reregulation

Eight and a half years ago in Betting with Deregulation – A Risky Proposition, I wrote the following in this blog, “Companies who want deregulation of anything must be prepared for eventual pain – just ask the major airlines and a bunch of telecom companies, many of...
2025 In One Word: Dowzh

2025 In One Word: Dowzh

These are quite the times in which we live, energy and otherwise. It makes predictions tricky, especially when business titans Vivek Ramaswami and Elon Musk hone their meat axes for the federal government. The administrative branch doesn’t pass budgets and write tax...
Seven Chicken Bones Scorecard

Seven Chicken Bones Scorecard

Here is my annual scorecard against energy predictions I made 51 weeks ago in Seven Chicken Bones for 2024. Chicken Bone One There would be at least five clean energy curtailments of at least $100 million apiece in 2024. On December 2, 2024, The Wall Street Journal...
A Better Value of Economic Dispatch

A Better Value of Economic Dispatch

Last week and many other times, I’ve written about soaring electricity loads and prices climbing even faster. The reality is prices are rising much quicker than load. For example, grid loads in Oregon have increased at a compounded rate of a modest 2%, while...
Two Questions for Electric Utility Stakeholders

Two Questions for Electric Utility Stakeholders

Remember the theory that deregulation in the late 1990s would waive the need for energy efficiency programs? If not, you can read up on the Great Depression in Energy Efficiency, the origins of which began with the 1992 Energy Policy Act. I believe the theory at the...