When homes and businesses crank up energy-intensive air conditioners, the risk of power outages increases in extremely hot temperatures if electricity output fails to meet rising consumption. The surge in real-time prices signaled tight energy supplies across major metropolitan areas. …
News Tag: Electric grid
Over-reliance on Renewables Contributed to Spain’s Blackout
At approximately 12:30 p.m. on April 28, 2025, Spain suddenly lost 15 gigawatts of electricity: 60 percent of its national electricity consumption. Since demand outpaced any remaining generation, the nation’s entire grid suffered a catastrophic failure. The entire Iberian Peninsula, including all of Spain and Portugal, along with portions of southern France, saw its industry, …
The Supreme Court Will Not Stay the EPA Power Plant Rule While It Goes through the Lower Courts
The Supreme Court has decided not to stay the EPA’s “power plant rule” that requires the use of an expensive and non-commercial technology while lower courts deliberate the rule and its legality. …
Higher Electricity Costs and Coal Retirements
PJM, the largest electric grid operator in the nation,conducts an auction annually to ensure that its 13-state region has sufficient electricgenerating capacity − roughly speaking, enough power plants − to meet its future electricitydemand. The purpose of the recent auction was to procure generating capacity for 2025/26.The most striking thing about the auction was the …
Renewables not cost competitive until mid-century – Glencore
Renewable energy will not be cost competitive with fossil fuels until 2050, Glencore said on Tuesday, much later than energy organizations forecast and supporting the mining and trading giant’s case for continued investment in coal. …
PJM power auction results yield sharply higher prices
An annual power market auction by the largest U.S. electrical grid operator resulted in prices more than 800% higher than last year as supply dwindled and demand increased, the operator said on Tuesday. …
The Biden EPA’s Plan to Ration Electricity
The Biden Administration’s regulations are coming so fast and furious that it’s hard even to keep track, but we’re trying. On Thursday the Environmental Protection Agency proposed its latest doozy—rules that will effectively force coal plants to shut down while banning new natural-gas plants. …
Breathe a Little Easier: Why America’s Air is Among the Cleanest in the World
Breathe a Little Easier is part of our ongoing effort to explain the role that energy has played in improving human living standards over the past two centuries. This project examines trends in air quality in the U.S. in order to push back at the doom-and-gloom narratives that dominate so much of our thinking about energy …
The Coming Electricity Crisis
President Biden and the press keep raising alarms about a climate crisis that his policies can’t do much about. Yet in the meantime they’re ignoring how government climate policies are contributing to a looming electric-grid crisis that is more urgent and could be avoided. …
U.S. needs coal
It’s not hard to sense that something extraordinary is happening in the United States: Digital technology has been neglected by policymakers in the nation’s energy demand. The evidence can be found in the vast computer-server farms that move and store data and activate everything from smartphones to laptops to digital TVs and make up the …
