Last week I reviewed some of the disruptive challenges that the private, investor-owned utility (IOU) sector is facing in the transition to distributed renewable energy production, and they are serious. Last month, […]
Guessing Game: Tesla’s Gigafactory and Energy Storage Aims
Tesla made a splash last week with its proposed $5 billion “Gigafactory” and its eye-popping numbers: a 10 million square foot facility on an entire land area of 500-1,000 acres, with output […]
Is Utility 2.0 a Forecast or a Post-Mortem?
For the last six months, the energy news sphere (perhaps led by the Edison Electric Institute) has been rife with a discussion about the threat to the utility business from distributed energy […]
China is so bad at conservation that it had to launch the most impressive water-pipeline project ever
BEIJING—On a Saturday morning in late August, about a dozen university students, professors, and middle-aged Beijing locals stand by a row of apartments in northwestern Beijing. Once an outskirt of the city known […]
Why hydrogen-powered cars will drive Elon Musk crazy
Forget the Tesla Model S. Another car of the future is finally hitting the highway. After decades of development—and no small amount of skepticism—major automakers are set to start selling hydrogen fuel-cell […]
An Introduction to Oil and Gas Hedges: Collars
Many upstream oil and gas companies enter into derivative contracts to hedge some of their commodity price risk. This article serves to explain how to explain the basics of the types of […]
A recent natural gas liquids price dip affects energy companies
Natural gas liquids, or NGLs, are a group of hydrocarbons (ethane, propane, butanes, and pentanes) that are often found alongside dry natural gas (methane). Many upstream companies (companies that produce crude oil […]
Obama to tighten fuel efficiency standards for big trucks
President Obama will announce Tuesday that the federal government will further tighten fuel efficiency for medium- and heavy-duty trucks, according to a White House official, as part of the president’s ongoing effort […]
Fracking the Eagle Ford: What Chemicals Are Spewed From Oil Wells
Air pollutants are released at every stage of oil and gas extraction. This diagram shows some of the many emission sources during drilling, fracking, production and processing at an oil well in […]
Fracking the Eagle Ford: Citizens’ Complaints Reveal Air Pollution Woes
The top environmental regulator in Texas, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), keeps a public database of citizen complaints filed with the agency. We scraped hundreds of entries to find the […]
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