My coffeemaker, a 1995-vintage Hamilton-Beach automatic drip filter machine, takes roughly eight minutes to make four cups of coffee. The appliance is rated at 1000 watts (one kilowatt), which means that in those eight minutes it uses roughly 0.133 kilowatt-hours. Of course, I don’t turn off the power as soon as the coffee is ready:…
Of all the countries on earth, France is the only one with the foresight, confidence, and discipline to have recognized and then immediately implemented the right energy strategy during the existential economic upset that resulted from the 1973 oil crisis. Like every other modern country, France realized instantly, when Saudi Arabia began dramatically raising the…
A soirée is an evening event, meaning that most soirées held in non-polar latitudes take place at a time when solar photovoltaic devices are not experiencing very many photon interactions and hence are generating very little if any electricity. So if you are throwing a soirée and need electricity, it’s wise to make sure the…
All Bruce Power nuclear reactors are running, as of just this afternoon. This is the first time since 1996 that the plant’s 8 units have all been running, and the first time in Bruce Power’s history. As I mentioned in early April, Bruce Power is a hugely successful public-private partnership that began in 2001 in…
I call myself an energy and environment consultant, a specialist and expert in the nexus of energy technology processes and operations and government energy and environment policy. That is the ostensible focus of most of my professional work. But there is “dark matter” and “dark energy” in this work. It involves the humans I work…
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