Category: Domestic

April 1, 2021

The mid-February blackouts in Texas have raised a lot of questions about power grid reliability. While investigations into the underlying causes of the outages could take a while to complete, and I don’t want to weigh in on the main […]

March 22, 2021

The power outages in Texas are an all too painful reminder how extreme weather events can expose weaknesses in our energy infrastructure. But until we’re willing to make bold moves on how we approach energy, these incidents likely won’t change. […]

March 3, 2021

Communications Systems, Inc. (CSI), an IoT intelligent edge products and services company, announced that it entered into a definitive merger agreement with privately held Pineapple Energy, an operator and consolidator of residential solar, battery storage, and grid services solutions. Upon […]

October 19, 2020

U.S. homes and commercial buildings consume roughly two-fifths of the country’s overall energy and three-fourths of all electricity, and account for most of the peak electricity demand that drives generation and power grid infrastructure costs. Each of these statistics points […]

July 28, 2020

Coal burn in the power sector has fallen off a cliff. Demand peaked at 1.045 billion tons in 2007. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates consumption in 2020 will be 377 million tons, a drop of 64% in little […]

July 23, 2020

A round-up of recent news from the US, where Recurrent Energy moves closer to completing two Texas projects and major corporations call on Congress to pass measures to bolster green energy growth. Recurrent Energy secures funding for Texas solar projects […]

July 16, 2020

Open Systems International, Inc. (OSI) has been awarded a contract by the city of St. George, Utah for a new SCADA and Distribution Management System (DMS). Based on OSI’s monarch operational technology (OT) platform, this new system will replace St. […]

May 29, 2020

The EIA states that this outcome mainly reflects the continued decline in the amount of coal used for electricity generation over the past decade as well as growth in renewable energy, mostly from wind and solar. Compared with 2018, coal […]

May 18, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating global public health and economic effects, and as shelter-in-place orders reduce energy demand across the United States, the pandemic’s associated climate impacts are coming into view. Significant uncertainty around economic activity mean few emissions […]

March 23, 2020

There is little doubt that the world has entered a global economic recession as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Every recession lowers energy use, and this one may be a whopper. The 2008 financial crisis, and the Great Recession […]

February 18, 2020

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently released its Annual Energy Outlook 2020 report. Unlike Lazard’s annual present to empirically oriented observers of the global energy transformation, the EIA’s reports typically are head-scratchers, and this one is no different. That’s […]

January 16, 2020

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) in its first forecast for 2021 suggests the share of renewables in the utility-scale U.S. power generation mix will surge to 22%, up from 17% last year, while coal and nuclear’s shares will be […]

November 12, 2019

Presidential candidates, state governments, and utilities are promoting “net zero” emissions targets to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and preserve a safe climate future by helping to limit global warming to well below 2°C. But few of them are […]

October 25, 2019

As much as wind and solar are increasing, natural gas is increasing more. And gas will continue to grow faster than all other energy sources in the United States for some time. Over the past fifteen years, coal has decreased […]

July 5, 2019

This article is the fourth in a series on BP’s recently-released Statistical Review of World Energy 2019. The Review provides a comprehensive picture of supply and demand for major energy sources on a country-level basis. Previous articles covered carbon dioxide […]