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David Schlissel
Red Flags Ignored in Long Run-up to Power Plant Debacle
Call it what you will: fiasco, debacle, calamity, misadventure. But not a surprise. Georgia-based Southern Company and its regulators in Mississippi were warned years ago that the experimental and now infamous “clean coal” Kemper power plant project was a shot in the dark. They kept at it anyway, pushing the price tag to $7.5 billion, […]
Tim Buckley
Markets Continue to Outpace Retro Government Policies
What’s missing from Donald Trump’s economically ludicrous promise to revive failed Rust Belt industries in the U.S. is an honest discussion of the economic and technological transition that is rapidly unfolding. New industries are growing that have already created many millions of jobs around the world and that will provide clean energy to power the 21st […]
Press Release
Keeping Kyger Creek and Clifty Creek on Life Support Would Cost Ratepayers $1.4 Billion; Market Conditions Will Continue to Undermine Viability of Aging Coal-Fired Plants; Public Resources Are Better Spent on Investing in Transition; Neither Generator Is Needed for Grid Stability
June 20, 2017 (IEEFA.org) – The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) today published a research brief questioning a bill in the Ohio legislature that would bail out two failing coal-fired power plants owned by the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation (OVEC) and keep the plants alive at huge expense to ratepayers. The plants […]
Karl Cates and Seth Feaster
Markets Are Changing; the Media Is Catching Up; Renewables Account for 20% of Total Generation in Latest Data Snapshot
What feels sometimes like a reluctant transformation is taking hold in the emergence of a “when” rather than “if” media narrative on the rise of renewable energy. This awakening is especially noticeable in the financial press, which can often seem captive in a historically entrenched way to the very financiers or industries it covers. Myopia […]
Yulanda Chung
The Renewables Sector Is No Longer the Experimental Space It Was
“Coal is dead,” Jim Barry, the global head of BlackRock‘s infrastructure investment group, said in a recent interview with the Australian Financial Review. “Anyone who’s looking to take beyond a 10-year view on coal is gambling very significantly,” Barry told the AFR for an article that is notable not just for what it says but […]
Seth Feaster and Tom Sanzillo
Transition in Local and Regional Energy Economies Calls for a Strategy to Promote Growth, Replace Jobs and Sustain Fiscal Budgets
In a research report we published in January, we explained how the U.S. coal industry will very likely continue its overall decline in a trend that will be accompanied by both employment and market volatility. A passage from that report (“Short-Term Gains Muted by Prevailing Weaknesses in Fundamentals”): “Some mine openings and some attendant hirings […]
Tim Buckley
‘Defer, Delay and Pray’ Appear to Be the Unspoken New Watchwords for the Company That Would Build the Carmichael Coal Project
Gautam Adani, the chairman of the Indian conglomerate Adani Group, has long argued that the Carmichael coal proposal in the Galilee Basin of Australia is a key part of his company’s “integrated pit-to-plug strategy.” The Adani logic for the Carmichael project assumes that the traded price of seaborne thermal coal is irrelevant to the commercial […]
Tom Sanzillo
The Energy-Policy Story Is Snowballing
President Trump’s flamboyant withdrawal from the Paris Agreement dealt a reputational and economic blow to the U.S., where energy policy is becoming a bigger story than ever. A major but not entirely unrelated subplot is emerging out of an angry-shareholder vote demanding that ExxonMobil, the biggest oil company in the world, show more accountability in how it […]
Press Release
Initiative to Limit Job Losses and Community Disruption; Investing in Economic Growth Rather Than Subsidizing Northern Arizona's Failing Coal Industry
June 6, 2017 (IEEFA.org) – The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) today published a report outlining an economic- growth strategy for a region that stands to be set back severely by the closure of the Navajo Generating Station and the Kayenta coal mine. The proposal—“A Transition Plan for Communities Affected by the […]
David Schlissel
More Capacity From Gas-Fired Generation and Renewable Sources Creates an Existential Problem for the Old Order
Coal-fired electricity plants across much of the U.S. earn their revenues by selling megawatt hours (MWh) into competitive wholesale capacity markets in the capacity that generation represents in megawatts (MW). The trends in the revenue these plants earn through selling their capacity in periodic auctions are increasingly worrisome for their owners. Energy market prices have […]
IEEFA Update: Will Southern Company Refund Mississippi Ratepayers for Failed $7.5 Billion Kemper ‘Clean Coal’ Experiment?
Red Flags Ignored in Long Run-up to Power Plant Debacle
Call it what you will: fiasco, debacle, calamity, misadventure. But not a surprise. Georgia-based Southern Company and its regulators in Mississippi were warned years ago that the experimental and now infamous “clean coal” Kemper power plant project was a shot in the dark. They kept at it anyway, pushing the price tag to $7.5 billion, […]