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Trump to Meet With Oil CEOs About Helping Industry
President Trump is set to meet Friday with the heads of some of the largest U.S. oil companies to discuss measures to help the industry weather an unprecedented oil crash, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting is to take place at the White House and will include Exxon Mobil Corp. Chief Executive Darren Woods, Chevron Corp. Chief Executive Mike Wirth, Harold Hamm, executive chairman of Continental Resources Inc., and other top executives, the people said. [ read more … ]
Wind Energy
Wyoming Confronts Its Wind-Powered Destiny
A massive wind turbine rises into the air about 60 yards from where I stand. Silhouetted against an endless blue sky, the structure is taller than the Statue of Liberty, and the tips of its three blades spin more than 150 miles per hour, fast enough to complete one revolution every four seconds or so. Looking up at it from the ground is disorienting. Opposite me, on the driver’s side of the pickup, is Laine Anderson, director of wind operations at PacifiCorp, a public utility company that powers more than 140,000 square miles across six Western states. As I move to hop in the truck, Anderson cautions me to watch my door. He’s never actually seen one blow off a vehicle, but PacifiCorp does cover the possibility in safety training. [ read more … ]
Grid
Grid crisis plan gets pandemic test
The nation’s electric power industry, defending now against an all-too-real coronavirus pandemic, got a report card yesterday on an imagined nightmare — a devastating cyber and terrorist attack that was simulated in a preparedness exercise in November. The report on the nationwide GridEx V training exercise was released yesterday by the grid’s security monitor, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC). Online “war games” challenged more than 7,000 utility officials, government leaders and other participants to defend against and recover from coordinated physical and cyber assaults, including a hacking attack based on the real takedown of part of Ukraine’s grid by Russia in 2016. [ read more … ]
Car Rule
California poised to sue Trump again to stop another clean car rollback
Trump’s loosening of fuel economy standards means that cars will be allowed to emit more climate-warming carbon dioxide as well as pollutants that cause smog and other air pollution. California is prepared to take the Trump administration to court – again –after the federal government on Tuesday rolled back its major rule reducing greenhouse gases and smog-forming emissions from cars. [ read more … ]
In the fine print
A controversial figure called an “implicit opportunity cost” that was tucked into the White House’s rollback of auto emissions rules was not among the final calculations cited by EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to support the rollback. But it was included in the lengthy rule text as making it more beneficial by $40 billion to $60 billion, something critics say is an attempt to make the deregulatory action more appealing [ read more … ]
Note: News clips provided do not necessarily reflect the views of coalition or its member governors.