February 24, 2025
Why We Do the Research
One of the wonderful things about science is that research results cannot be consistently anticipated. That’s why we do the research. That research doesn’t always come out how we expect is particularly problematic for partisans who expect research to provide results in alignment with their political commitments. So you think hurricane landfalls have become more…
February 21, 2025
Innovating Future Power Systems: From Vision to Action
Key Points Read the full report here.
February 19, 2025
Regional Transmission Organizations as Market Platforms IV
Networks shape modern life. From roads to the internet to global supply chains, they enable movement, exchange, and value creation. But networks also suffer from congestion, a problem driven by both physical limitations and the difficulty of defining and enforcing property rights. In some networks, pricing mechanisms can help mitigate congestion, but political and regulatory…
February 18, 2025
The Dilemmas of Democracy
In his classic 1960 book, The Semisovereign People, political scientist E.E. Schattschneider identified a dilemma of democracy: All of us are ignorant about most things, making each of us unsuitable to govern — yet we also have a belief that everyone should be allowed to participate in governance, with our political leaders chosen from among the…
February 12, 2025
The North American Fire Deficit
An important new paper published this week in Nature Communications looks at the historical record of fire in North America — A fire deficit persists across diverse North American forests despite recent increases in area burned. Parks et al. find that large fires of recent decades in North America are not unprecedented: Our study of 1851 tree-ring fire-scar…
February 10, 2025
Hits and Misses
The term “scenario” was introduced by a group of researchers at the RAND Corporation in the 1960s. Herman Kahn explained its origin in 1979: “We deliberately chose the word [scenario] to deglamorize the concept . . . There is no a priori concept that a scenario should be taken seriously or that it is intended to reflect aspects…
February 3, 2025
IPCC at the Crossroads
Long-time readers of THB will know well that I am strongly supportive of formal scientific assessments — a form of science arbitration, as defined in my book which gives this site its name. Scientific assessments are essential for understanding what relevant experts collectively think they know, what they think they don’t, along with surfacing uncertainties, disagreements, and…
January 31, 2025
Regional Transmission Organizations as Market Platforms III
As a follow-on to my previous two posts on regional transmission organizations (RTOs) in electricity, I was heading in a direction that relies on you, dear reader, having a foundational understanding of the investor-owned utilities (IOUs) that are the transmission owners (TOs) in RTOs. Many of you do, but lots don’t, especially tech folks who…
January 27, 2025
The Most Major Hurricanes Ever
Last year the world experienced the most major hurricane landfalls since records are available, tying only 2015, with 11 storms. Does last year indicate that we have reached a new climate-fueled normal? Let’s have a look. More than a decade ago, Jessica Weinkle, Ryan Maue, and I published the first long-period global hurricane landfall dataset using a consistent methodology….
January 24, 2025
Regional Transmission Organizations as Market Platforms II
Whether it’s rising electricity bills, reliability concerns, an impetus for decarbonization, or the related importance of grid modernization, power systems in the U.S. and around the world are struggling with change. In this series on regional transmission organizations (RTOs), I’m digging in to the institutional aspects of these challenges. Last time I started with history….