Mining the Energy Transition

Mining the Energy Transition

A few weeks ago, we had a little snafu. A promotional email said the energy transition is failing. That hit a nerve with one state government official. This week, I’ll present some facts, and you can decide. Cobalt First, we have the issue of diversity, equity, and...
Phony Avoided Cost Models in a Free-Agent Market

Phony Avoided Cost Models in a Free-Agent Market

The last two posts, Nuclear Power over the White Rabbit and the Clean Power Plan Corpse, demonstrated the fruits of an undiversified baseload fleet of power generation. Electricity prices, which were so low during most of my career that few cared about them, are...
The Power Grid’s Glide Path to Reckoning

The Power Grid’s Glide Path to Reckoning

“The U.S. electrical system is becoming less dependable. The problem is likely to get worse before it gets better.” – The Wall Street Journal, February 18, 2022. I can take down another one of my seven predictions for 2022. Some numbers from the WSJ: in 2000, there...
100 Years and 50,000 Feet Over Ukraine

100 Years and 50,000 Feet Over Ukraine

I’m breaking my word from last week’s natural gas shakedown in which I noted I would write about customer intolerance for high energy prices this week. Since then, a kerfuffle has broken out in the Eurasian landmass. I was asked if I might be interested in writing...
Natural Gas – Shakedown, 1979

Natural Gas – Shakedown, 1979

My, how quickly some things can change, almost overnight, like natural gas markets. It seems only a year ago we had more natural gas than we could consume, as far as the eye could see. Barely three years ago, I wrote that Permian Basin oil production resulted in...