Inside Energy (https://insideenergy.org/tag/natural-gas/page/2/)
Electricity prices typically move in one direction: up. But for the first time in more than a decade, residential electricity prices have dropped nationally. Regionally, however, the picture can be very different. Here’s a state-by-state look at how electricity prices have changed.
This isn’t your typical rodeo. There are no horses, no cowboys and no lassos. But you will see skilled natural gas workers wield backhoes and shovels in a competition for bragging rights.
The Clean Power Plan is our country’s most ambitious attempt yet to fight climate change, and it’s causing quite the legal stir. But what does it mean for you, and how big of a deal is it, really?
A new series on New England’s energy transformation from our colleagues at the New England News Collaborative.
On the morning of April 29, a natural gas transmission line exploded in a field in Salem Township in western Pennsylvania. The blast was so powerful it ripped a 12-foot crater into the landscape, burned a section of the field with a quarter-mile radius and threw a 25-foot section of the 30-inch steel pipeline 100 feet away. At the time of the explosion, a 26-year-old man was in his house, a few hundred feet away. He was badly burned, and his home destroyed. When local fire chief Bob Rosatti arrived at the scene, the flames were so hot, he had to stay in his truck. “They were massive—I would say 300 feet at the least,” Rosatti says. “That was the biggest fireball I’d ever seen in my life.
How we get electricity in the West is changing. Fast. New projections put 2016 as the biggest year ever for natural gas-fired power plants. But that’s just the beginning of the story.
Burning natural gas for electricity is much cleaner than coal. But there’s a problem – leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Nearly 2 years ago Colorado implemented rules to try to limit methane leaks from natural gas infrastructure. Now the EPA is proposing to model federal rules on Colorado’s. Still finding and plugging leaks remains a challenge nationwide. In Pennsylvania, where thousands of gas wells and pipelines are working the Marcellus Shale, researchers are trying to figure out how much is leaking. For our Inside Energy project, The Allegheny Front’s Reid Frazier tagged along.
Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. fell by 12% in 2015, compared to 2005 levels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Aspen, Colorado is known for being a wealthy ski town. And now it’s trying for another claim to fame — a 100 percent renewable city, only the third in the U.S.
