How Utilities Blew $40 Billion on Failed Power Plants
Energy Gang
Wood Mackenzie
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2017
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Good journalism is more important than ever. In our last episode of the year, we're choosing our favorite energy reporting of 2017.
We'll start off with a conversation about a damning investigative piece on how U.S. utilities put ratepayers on the hook for $40 billion in failed coal and nuke projects.
Tony Bartelme, a special projects reporter at the Post and Courier, joins us to talk about his bombshell story, "Power Failure: How Utilities Across the U.S. Changed the Rules to Make Big Bets With Your Money."
He and his team talked with 50 sources in industry and government. They uncovered a systematic effort to obfuscate problems with risky coal and nuke projects -- and pay executives handsomely while doing so.
In the second half of the show, we'll discuss some of our other favorite stories about microgrids, coal country, electric cars, fuel cells, politics, and the global energy transition.
This podcast is sponsored by Mission Solar Energy, a solar module manufacturer based in San Antonio, Texas. You can find out more about Mission’s American-made, high-power modules at missionsolar.com.
Here's a list of our favorite stories that we discussed on the show:
- Vox: Meet the Microgrid, the Technology Poised to Transform Electricity
- NY Times: Where Wind Farms Meet Coal Country, There's Enduring Faith in Trump
- Medium: The Last Auto Mechanic
- Quartz: Amazon’s Hydrogen-Powered Forklifts Are Its Latest Attempt to Beat Walmart
- GTM: Global Oil Majors Are Poised for a Resurgence in Solar and Wind
- GTM: In Storage vs. Peaker Study, CAISO’s Outdated Cost Estimates Produce Higher Price Tag for Storage
- GTM: The Rising Tide of Evidence Against Blaming Wind and Solar for Grid Instability
- GTM: First Solar Proves That PV Plants Can Rival Frequency Response Services From Natural Gas Peakers
- GTM: What Superstorm Sandy Taught Consolidated Edison, 5 Years On
- Twitter: Suggestions from the energy community on the top stories
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This Podcast is brought to you by Mission Solar Energy, a solar module manufacturer based in San Antonio, Texas. |
| 0:07.0 | Mission Solar modules are designed, engineered, and assembled in their Texas-based 200 megawatt facility and serve residential commercial government and utility applications. |
| 0:17.5 | Adhering to the strictest quality standards, Mission Solar's modules outperform their |
| 0:21.8 | competition in real-world conditions, proving to be an easy choice |
| 0:25.4 | for installers, distributors, and developers. |
| 0:28.4 | To find out more about Mission's High Power American Quality modules, visit Mission Solar.com. |
| 0:34.0 | From Green Tech Media, this is the Energy Gang, a weekly digest on energy, Tech, and the Environment. |
| 0:43.0 | I'm Stephen Lacy in Boston. |
| 0:44.4 | Welcome. |
| 0:46.4 | I distinctly remember how I felt when Donald Trump took the oath of office this January. |
| 0:55.0 | I was thinking less about politics and more about information and journalism. |
| 1:00.0 | It was clear that we were on the verge of an epochal shift in our discourse, that we had crossed |
| 1:03.9 | the Rubicon into an informational civil war. |
| 1:07.1 | Of course that war had been brewing for a long time, both in the mainstream press and the hidden |
| 1:10.7 | corners of the web. |
| 1:12.1 | But this year in 2017, it broke out in a big way. |
| 1:15.2 | Many of us spend our days in the informational battlefield hunched over our screens, |
| 1:19.4 | bombarded with hot takes, daily outrages, and different versions of reality, which makes real journalism |
| 1:25.3 | so damn important. |
| 1:27.8 | So today for our last episode of the year, we're cutting through the noise and choosing |
| 1:31.0 | our favorite energy journalism of 2017. |
| 1:34.0 | These are the stories that cut to the heart of reality, helping us understand the scandals, |
... |
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