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Climate Reality Hits Massachusetts

  While campaigning for Governor of Massachusetts four years ago, Maura Healey boasted that as state Attorney General she had “stopped two gas pipelines from coming into this state.” Now she’s pleading with the Trump Administration to expedite permits for a pipeline expansion. Add Gov. Healey to the list of Democrats mugged by energy reality. “On several occasions we have discussed our mutual desire to get more U.S. natural gas into New England to reduce reliance on higher-cost imported fuel and lower costs for customers,” she wrote Energy Secretary Chris Wright last week. Her letter beseeches the Administration to move “quickly” and with “urgency” on the federal review needed to expand the Algonquin gas pipeline. “This addition, together with other recent expansions, would have provided enough gas capacity on this line to meet total household heating needs this past January,” Ms. Healey writes. She says it also could save 600,000 utility customers $40 million a year, and “any fe...
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NYISO

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  New York Energy Alliance   @NYEnergyAllies   One nuclear reactor being turned back on is generating four times more electricity than New York's utility-scale solar fleet in 24 hours.   Look at the dark band at the bottom of the chart. That's New York's nuclear fleet, and on Monday it was noticeably taller than it's been all fall.     The reason is FitzPatrick. Constellation's 853 MW reactor on Lake Ontario, near Oswego, finished a three-week refueling outage on October 3. While it was down, New York's nuclear fleet averaged about 2,450 MW. On Monday it ran at 3,290 MW, flat around the clock, at 3 AM, at noon and at 7 PM.   That one reactor added about 20 GWh to the grid in a single day: More than all of New York's wind combined (15 GWh). Nearly four times the state's utility-scale solar (5 GWh). About half of all solar statewide, rooftops included (41 GWh). With FitzPatrick back, nuclear supplied 21% of the state's power on Monday, up from roughly...
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Offshore Wind’s Existential Crisis at Climate Week

  American offshore wind’s existential crisis was laid bare at this year’s Climate Week. California and New York officials gathered on Tuesday at the New York Bar Association in Manhattan to tell attendees of the annual climate action mega-event about their efforts to hold the Trump administration to account. After Trump regulators upended wind projects off the East Coast and struck buyout trades with energy developers to ditch ocean wind leases, both states filed fresh legal action against the administration, targeting what they said were egregious abuses of taxpayer dollars that canceled once-promising projects that would’ve given gigawatts of power to grids expecting energy demand to spike. “Every megawatt in offshore wind power is not a megawatt of fossil fuel generated power. That’s really important. That means fewer emissions that contribute to respiratory and cardiac disease,” Lem Srolovic, bureau chief of the New York attorney general’s environmental protection bureau, s...
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Trump Keeps Wind Farms Waiting Despite Court Ruling

  A federal judge ruled in early August that the Trump administration’s freeze on vertical height clearances for wind turbines was likely illegal. More than a month later nearly all of the wind energy projects remain on pause, as federal officials add new red tape that industry representatives say runs afoul of the court’s edict. Let’s catch-up quickly on the American wind sector’s existential dilemma: the federal government has control over airspace higher than 200 feet from the ground and wind farm turbines essentially always enter that sphere of control. For at least a year and a half, the Trump administration through the Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration has slowly gummed up what industry and former government officials have said was once a rote, benign bureaucratic process for ensuring turbine rotation didn’t interfere with flight patterns or radar at nearby airports. So, Trump is delaying key approvals even for wind projects on private land, a wo...
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Ban Gas, Pay More.

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  Electricity prices across the US are, pardon the pun, rising at shocking rates. According to the Energy Information Administration, residential electricity prices in June were 5% higher than they were in June 2025 . The average price of electricity in American homes is now about 18.3 cents per kilowatt-hour. In 2016, that same amount of juice cost US residential consumers 12.5 cents. Thus, over the past decade, consumers have seen their home electricity costs jump by 46%. What’s driving the surge in power costs? According to a June report by Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy , the price increases “were driven primarily by investments in distribution and transmission networks, fuel volatility, routine maintenance, and policy mandates rather than load growth.” Of course, there are different theories for the jump in power costs, and price increases vary, a fact highlighted on a handy new website, bluestateshighrates.com . Regardless of what’s driving those higher prices, the...
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Wind Power Has Benefitted North Dakota. So Why Have Residents Soured on It?

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  George Wolff offered a cautious greeting through the window of my rented F-150. He was fresh from tending livestock, which explained the dried mud on his forehead and shirt. His boots and jeans were soiled with barnyard muck, his ballcap tipped back to cool his brow.  It was a warm, breezy May day in Wishek, North Dakota, with wind speeds hovering around 20 miles per hour, gusting to the low 30s. Angus cattle foraged on a hillside pasture behind Wolff’s barns. Two John Deere tractors sat idle off the driveway. Planting season was over, but a dry spring had slowed the arrival of this year’s wheat, corn, and soybeans.  “What can I do for you?” asked Wolff, a fourth-generation farmer. The answer was about a half mile behind him, rising above his land like an enormous pinwheel.  That 3-megawatt turbine, one of two on Wolff’s 3,500-acre property, is part of Badger Wind Farm. The 92-turbine, 250-MW project was brought online in January by the Danish energy giant Ørsted...
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Necessary Inventions

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  Sep 05, 2026   “Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.” – Richard Bach Among the most ironclad, stone-cold, lead-pipe-lock bets of history is that aggregate primary energy consumption is a curve that goes up and to the right . Longtime readers will be familiar with the physical foundations for why this is so: The human endeavor is a constant, unrelenting struggle against the forces of entropy; one must harness primary energy to temporarily prevail in that struggle; one’s standard of living is thus measured by how much primary energy is on offer for the task; and all humans everywhere want a higher standard of living. Wars, famines, political crises, and pandemics come and go. Degrowth nutters and carbon-counters ebb and flow in their political influence. Social shaming to make do with less—an impulse that invariably emanates from do-gooders already flush with abundance—occasionally bends localized policy for short perio...
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