Articles by John Funk

The nation’s largest utility is facing criticism from a multistate citizens coalition for its climate record. Duke Energy CEO Lynn Good | Duke Energy The Duke Energy Accountability Coalition has called for shareholders to vote Duke Energy CEO Lynn Good off the Charlotte, N.C.-based company’s board of directors during its...

Moving the nation to net-zero carbon emissions will require a massive transformation of the grid, and that won’t easily happen without a revolution in the relationship between regulators, energy providers and energy technology innovators, a panel of business, technology and government experts concluded this week. One way to foster this...

FirstEnergy has disclosed it is negotiating with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding its role in a $60 million bribery and racketeering scheme involving Ohio Rep. Larry Householder (R), the former speaker of the House of Representatives. Householder and four associates were indicted in July 2020 on corruption charges in...

The U.S. offshore wind industry’s efforts to meet demand from East Coast states trying to decarbonize their grids by 2050, and now the Biden administration’s goal to get 30,000 MW of generation in the water by 2030, puts new pressure on it to include minority/women-owned business enterprises (MWBEs) in their...

The success of the drive by five New England states to decarbonize their economies may ultimately depend on the development of massive offshore wind farms only now being developed, says a nationally recognized Maine-based renewable energy expert. "New England states are rapidly decarbonizing their electricity grids. Every state in New...

The emergence of electric vehicles and the transition of homes to electric heating over the next decades would lead to winter peak demand that could destabilize the grid, an analysis by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) concluded. But utilities could mitigate spikes and ensure reliability by improving...

The U.S. Department of Energy Thursday unveiled a third funding cycle in its 12-year-old Super Truck initiative to spark innovation in the trucking industry. In Super Truck 3, DOE is offering $162 million in a competition to improve vehicular electric drive systems, develop better batteries and build charging stations. The...

Trucking companies thinking about replacing today’s diesel-powered 18-wheelers with electric rigs could save on fuel costs if their charging stations were augmented with distributed generation, or on-site power storage and sophisticated electronics allowing for "managed" charging at times when grid power prices are at their lowest. These are the main...

The battle waged by some Ohio Republican lawmakers for more than a decade to limit wind and solar development is back on the front burner, this time with the support of some rural voters who say the decisions of the state’s Power Siting Board (PSB) on utility-scale projects should be...

Ohio lawmakers this week voted unanimously to eliminate the $1.1 billion customer-paid subsidy they created in July 2019 to bail out the state’s two nuclear power plants then owned by a former FirstEnergy subsidiary that had filed for bankruptcy protection. A spokesman for Energy Harbor, the company that emerged from...