Free Republic

Drillers in the fastest-growing oil region in the United States face infrastructure issues beyond limited pipeline takeaway capacity or water and frac sand supply. Permian oil producers need a lot more electricity to power well production than they did just a few years ago. And the West Texas electricity grid—which wasn’t planned for so heavy a load—is straining to catch up with power demand. Thanks to rising oil prices, oil production in the Permian has been surging. While drillers have flocked again to the hottest U.S. shale play, electricity infrastructure and transmission grids in West Texas need years to expand...

For 55 years, they have pumped their water from a well in their yard. Now the county is saying, “You have to use our water, and you have to pay for that water.” They said no. The county said yes, and it’s why the family then called Help Me Howard with Patrick Fraser. Very few families can say they have lived in their house as long as the Johnsons have. Susan Johnson, doesn’t want county water: “We had this house built in 1962...

Here are two recent events you might have missed: In March, House speaker Paul Ryan was widely quoted as saying, “The last thing we want to do is pass historic tax relief and then undo that, so we are not going to raise gas taxes.”The next month, in California, Republicans submitted 54 percent more than the required signatures to put on the November ballot a measure that would repeal the 2017 state law increasing gasoline and diesel taxes. Meanwhile, roads in Los Angeles are in such bad shape that it costs the average driver $892 a year in additional vehicle...

The number of electric, gas and water utilities cutting customer charges due to the recently passed Republican tax cuts has passed 100, and the total savings is about $3 billion. According to Americans for Tax Reform, the number has reached 101 with most utilities either cutting bills or not passing on the costs of expanding their operations. “When Democrats threaten to raise taxes if they get back into power they are threatening to raise your utility bill -- month after month,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. The general total for the cuts is over $2.8 billion....

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Appalachian Power Company saved $235 million dollars from the federal tax cuts and the company is proposing passing the money back to its customers in a variety of ways. The multi-pronged proposal is in a filing with the state Public Service Commission due Wednesday. The PSC is requiring all utilities to tell it their tax ts West Virginia Consumer Advocate Jackie Roberts told MetroNews the money clearly belongs to the customers. “They (the utilities) had taxes in their rates and now the taxes in their rates have significantly decreased—so they shouldn’t be able to keep collecting and...

After the deaths of more than 40 people and the destruction of thousands of homes in California’s terrible wildfires last year, the ultimate financial reckoning remains far off. Not long ago, the state’s insurance department put compensation claims at nearly $12 billion. Will utilities and their shareholders pay, or ratepayers, or taxpayers? Should utilities bear the brunt of the claims, as consumer advocates propose, it could have serious negative repercussions for the long-term health of the California utility industry. If ratepayers or taxpayers foot the bill, many residents of the Golden State will feel the pinch in their pocketbooks. According...

MT. VERNON, Ill.---There's quite the uproar going on in the city of Mt. Vernon and its surrounds as of the past few weeks, all of it having to do with water. Mainstream media has been all over the matter of the public's opposition to Illinois-American Water (IAW) being brought in to the Mt. Vernon area. You can find such stories as this on The Southern this morning following a meeting last night in Mt. V......

The Maryland Attorney General’s Office has called into question the state’s authority to grant permission to Tesla founder Elon Musk’s tunneling startup, The Boring Co., to build several miles of tunnels for his high-speed Hyperloop transportation system below the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. The State Highway Administration granted a conditional utility permit on Oct. 16 to allow The Boring Co. to begin building the tunnels, if the company supplies additional information about the project and it meets all necessary requirements. But the Hyperloop system “is not a utility under federal standards or SHA’s federally-approved utility accommodation policies,” Assistant Attorney General David Stamper...

[clip] The right wants regulation too, but of a very different kind. Multiple right-wing commentators have called for Google and Facebook, whose market share eclipses old 20th-century monopolies like Standard Oil and the Bell System, to be regulated like utilities. The impetus is the threat of political bias from companies that now have more influence over the flow of news and information than any other company in history. Facebook, through a recent change to its news feed algorithm, threatens to undercut the success of new media outlets. Google, by tweaking its search results, could swing an election anywhere in the...

On the heels of companies dishing bonuses of up to $3,000 to over one million workers due to the anticipated benefit of President Trump’s tax reform victory, several major utilities have announced plans to cut rates in a consumer payback related to the lower taxes. Energy suppliers like Washington’s Pepco, Baltimore Gas and Light, Pacific Power, Rocky Mountain Power and Commonwealth Edison said they plan to give hundreds of thousands of customers a rate cut due to the tax reform.

Utility companies annouce plans to reduce customers' energy costs. (Screenshot) From Washington, DC to Washington state, utility companies are crediting passage of Republicans’ Tax Cut and Jobs Act for their plans to lower their retail customers’ monthly bills. Company press releases announcing the rate-cut plans specifically cite “the decrease in the Corporate Tax Rate from 35 percent to 21 percent” as the reason for reducing energy rates. The utility companies that have reported plans to cut rates, thus far, include: Pepco plans to lower the bills of 296,000 electric customers in the District of Columbia, Pepco and Delmava Power...

Construction equipment: Terex Utilities and its dealer Xuzhou Handler Special Vehicles Co., Ltd. have signed a letter of intent for Xuzhou to purchase 5,000 units of insulated aerial devices from Terex over a five-year period, with a total value of more than USD 250 million. These products will support the continuing improvement and ongoing adoption of live line work practices in the Chinese public utility sector. The signing was completed during President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing last week. John Garrison, President and CEO of Terex Corp., was among 29 U.S. business executives and officials joining Trump and Secretary of...

"He just lost his mind for a moment," a Hialeah police detective saidA former Miami-Dade firefighter was arrested after he shot at two AT&T utility trucks while two workers were wiring cables outside his home in Hialeah Wednesday, police said. Cellphone video filmed by one of the workers shows a gunman walking toward the trucks and firing several shots, blowing out the trucks' tires. The suspect, identified as Jorge Jove, reloaded his weapon several times, police said. Moments later, officers arrived at the home off Southeast 5th Place and 6th Avenue near Okeechobee Road and took Jove into custody. The...

Federal authorities see no signs that hackers breached Vermont's electric grid using suspected Russian malware that infected a power company's laptop, the Department of Homeland Security said tonight. "While our analysis continues, we currently have no information that indicates that the power grid was penetrated in this cyber incident,” J. Todd Breasseale, DHS's assistant secretary for public affairs, told POLITICO in a statement. The discovery of the malware, first reported Friday by The Washington Post, inspired immediate concern that suspected Russian cyber-assaults against the United States had spread to the electric power supply, one of the nation's most sensitive potential...

(Editors’ note: This column is co-authored by NCPA Research Associate Luke Twombly) The second presidential debate might mention that a Russian state newspaper predicted direct confrontation with the United States over Syria. Neither candidate will probably note that the escalation comes as solutions to protect America’s frighteningly vulnerable electric grid system languish on Capitol Hill. Each should be reminded that an increasingly popular target for U.S. adversaries sits largely unguarded. Thankfully, Texas can take the lead. As the only state with a self-contained grid, Texas finds itself in a remarkable position to protect the nation by protecting itself. The primary...

It has gotten so bad that the phrase “Pension Crisis” made it into Wikipedia. It’s the perplexing reality that municipal, state, federal, and corporate pensions in the US and similar schemes around the world are so badly underfunded that it will be impossible to fulfill the promises by a wide margin. By many trillions of dollars. With state and municipal pension funds in the US, the situation is particularly tricky because the beneficiaries are voters and employees of the government, and politicians of all stripes bought their votes with promises of low contributions and rising benefits. They got away with...

Electric cars hold the potential to destroy the oil business and save the electricity business. The big question now is when this will happen. Last year the world consumed about 93 million barrels of crude oil per day. About 42 percent of that, or 39.5 mmbpd, was used for transportation. In its recent price swoon, oil prices went from over $100 per barrel to under $30 per barrel with a production surplus of 2 mmbpd worldwide. How would the industry fare with a surplus that was seven times greater?

In Illinois, Exelon again warned that the long-challenged Clinton and Quad Cities plants would shut down unless the Illinois legislature passed a bill that would provide economic support for the two plants ... Meanwhile in Florida, Florida Power & Light’s (FPL’s) bid to build two more units at its Turkey Point Nuclear Plant south of Miami continues to run into opposition. On April 20, a state court reversed approval for a new transmission line that would carry power from the two reactors. Two days later, the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) approved a plan to deal with serious saline...

Solar energy is rapidly becoming one of the top choices for new electricity capacity as costs continue to decline and generous public policies accelerate tremendous growth for the sector. Last year was a record year for the solar industry and the momentum is set to continue. In 2016, the EIA expects the U.S. electricity market to see 26 gigawatts of new capacity installed. Utility-scale solar is expected to capture 9.5 GW of that total, or more than one-third. If that comes to pass, it would be triple the rate of installations of utility-scale solar compared to 2015, and would also...

Obama Administration has illegally bypassed Congress, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the States and their Public Utility Commissions The global warming/climate change industry has been aggressively pushing renewable energy, wind, solar, and biofuels for a long time even though the economies of various industrialized countries need much more energy than what renewables generate. The green activists have been zealously lobbying Congress and the EPA to change the laws, rules, and regulations that would make it much more expensive and difficult for fossil fuel energy producers to survive while passing the higher costs onto consumers, impoverishing those customers on fixed...