electricity grid

2026: The Year Ahead

Here are six big things to watch.

What to watch for environmentally in 2026: court tests of Trump’s power, midterms, China, grid issues, and state energy moves. In 2025, Trump rolled out new initiatives at a dizzying rate. That story, in one form or another, dominated the news.  This year, much of the news will again be about Trump, but he will have less control of the narrative. Legal and political responses to Trump will play a greater role, as will economic developments. Trump’s anti-environmental crusade could run into strong headwinds.

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What Hath FERC Wrought?

FERC’s GOP majority has taken a swipe against renewable energy. It might work, or it might backfire.

At the end of June, in a vote divided along partisan lines, FERC handed down a sweeping order that will impact electricity markets in a wide swath of the country. — likely at the expense of renewable energy and nuclear power. Unfortunately, like Trump’s power plant bailout, the result may be to delay the closing …

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The Puzzle of Capacity Markets

What are capacity markets and why do they matter?

If you live in the Midwest, East of the Mississippi and North of the Mason-Dixon line, or in Arkansas or Louisiana, the companies that generate your electricity are covered by what are called capacity markets.  I’ll bet you didn’t know that.  That’s actually part of the problem, because there’s very little transparency and hence little …

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EPA Should Not Repeal the Clean Power Plan

The writing may be on the wall, but it’s still a terrible idea

Coauthored with Nat Logar Today is the close of EPA’s public comment period on its proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan. Though EPA’s decision to backtrack from the rule hardly seems in doubt, it is still important to state that repealing the Clean Power Plan is a terrible idea. My colleagues Ann Carlson, Nat …

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The Machine at the Center of the Clean Power Plan

By William Boyd, Ann Carlson and Cara Horowitz

As attention shifts from last night’s debate to today’s oral argument on the Clean Power Plan, we thought it worth focusing on the machine at the heart of the President’s plan to cut greenhouse gases from the electric power sector: the electricity grid.  You might think that the largest machine in the United States is one …

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