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Democrats Retake Congress. Here’s What They Plan to Do With It.

  The United States is set for a divided government for the first time since Donald Trump’s return to the White House last year. Voters across the country overwhelmingly cast ballots for Democrats, handily securing the party’s control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The victory came hours before polls closed in the nation’s westernmost reaches as Democrats flipped seats held by the GOP for decades in states such as Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas. It was a seismic national shift to the left, spurred in no small part by voters’ opposition to infrastructure supporting artificial intelligence and anger over rising gas and electricity prices, particularly since Trump launched a war on Iran. In an election widely seen as a referendum on Trump, Democrats trained their fire on the administration’s energy policies. Those include its moves to eliminate landmark climate regulations, its oversight of the U.S. buildout of data centers, its legally dubious deals to kill ...
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On El Hierro Island, At Least They Kept The Diesel Backup

  October 26, 2026   Francis Menton   On El Hierro Island in Spain, they set out to build an electricity system powered only by wind, with backup from a pumped-storage hydroelectric plant. The relevant statistics for El Hierro are: average electricity demand: 5 MW; nameplate capacity of the wind turbines: 11.5 MW (i.e., 2.3x “overbuild” compared to average usage); storage capacity of the pumped storage system: 70 MWh (i.e., 14 hours of average usage). The operator of the facility has provided eight years of operating data for the system. I reported on the results in my last post on October 23 . In summary, the wind/storage system provided 56% of the island’s electricity use in the best year, and only 35% in the worst year. During these years, the remainder of the island’s electricity — ranging from 44% in the “best” year for the wind system to 65% in the worst year — has been provided by a diesel generator. The wind/storage system has fallen far short of its stated goal ...
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RENEWABLE REALISM:

  By Marie J. French and Mona Zhang October 26, 2026 Good morning and welcome to the weekly Monday edition of the New York & New Jersey Energy newsletter. We'll take a look at the week ahead and look back on what you may have missed last week. RENEWABLE REALISM: There’s no clear way for New York to keep up the pace of renewable investments needed to (belatedly) achieve the state’s ambitious targets. “Without tax credits at the federal level, nobody sees a future for building rules in New York,” said Marguerite Wells, the executive director of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York. “That's a problem. How do we solve it? I have no magic bullets.” Wells’ bleak assessment — on the sidelines of the industry group’s fall conference in Albany — comes as the pool of new projects appears to be drying up, even as several legacy onshore solar and wind facilities enter construction. She pointed to the “tiny” number of renewable projects that have entered the upcoming New York Inde...
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Next CAWTILE meeting

  Next CAWTILE meeting Oct 29,2026, 7pm Southtowns Walleye Club 5895 Southwestern Blvd Hamburg , Ny 14075 Agenda: 1. CAWTILE updates 2. New board member, Linda Sansone. 3. Speaker : Scott Honer 4. Vote! Vote! Vote!
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Ideologues Try Their Hand At Ordering Up An Electrical Grid Powered Only By "Renewables"

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October 23, 2026   Francis Menton   In my post several days ago on October 18 , I recounted the story of how ignorant Chinese Communist Party ideologues in the late 1950s convinced themselves that they knew how to achieve limitless agricultural production by just ordering each community to produce large, arbitrary amounts of food. Do you want to double grain production? Then just plant twice as many seeds in the same acreage! The ideologues had no idea how agriculture actually worked in the real world. Within a couple of years, there was widespread famine, probably the largest in world history. Tens of millions died horrible deaths of starvation. At the end of that post I noted that, here in the West, equally ignorant ideologues were engaged, actually for a few decades now, in ordering up an energy transition to replace electricity generation by fossil fuels with generation mostly by intermittent wind and sun. Today’s energy transition ideologues have a lack of knowledge of ho...
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Blackstone Hauls in $8.7 Billion for Energy Transition Fund

  October 19, 2026   Takeaways by Bloomberg: Blackstone Inc. has raised $8.7 billion for a fund dedicated to cleaner energy, Blackstone Energy Transition Partners V, which is about 55% larger than its predecessor. The strategy invests in a broad range of sectors within the energy industry but generally excludes oil companies, and has already deployed a quarter of its capital into six investments. The new fund has attracted nearly one-third of its money from new investors, with Blackstone committing $150 million to the fund, according to David Foley, global head of the firm’s energy transition business.   Blackstone Inc. has raised $8.7 billion for a fund dedicated to cleaner energy, less than two years after wrapping up an earlier version of the strategy.   The latest fund, Blackstone Energy Transition Partners V , is about 55% larger than its predecessor, which closed with $5.6 billion in February 2025. Blackstone committed $150 million to the new fund, according ...
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The Northeast Climate Revolt

  Voters are revolting against high energy prices across the country, and Republicans are taking most of the blame as the party in power in Washington. But an under-reported story is that Democrats are on defense in the Northeast, where utility bills have spiked because of green energy mandates and progressive hostility to fossil fuels. It’s about time. Electricity and heating bills have shot up more in the Northeast than elsewhere. Over the last six years, residential electric rates have climbed by about 20% to 30% in most states, yet far more in Maine (92%), New York (59%), Rhode Island (45%) and Massachusetts (43%). Some households are paying hundreds of dollars more a month than they did a few years ago. Heating bills are also expected to surge this winter because of the Northeast’s reliance on oil. The Energy Information Administration recently estimated that winter energy bills will increase 21% this year for households that use heating oil. Roughly half of households in Mai...
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