District of Columbia Solar Carve-Out

A line graph showing the growth of dc reps.

District of Columbia Solar Carve-Out Background Late last year, the DC Council passed The Local Solar Expansion Act.  It was signed into law by the Mayor on January 10, 2023.  The Bill is currently in the 30-day Congressional review process for new DC laws.  The law will go into effect on the later of March…

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What a Difference a Year Makes

What a Difference a Year Makes Last September, our COO, Jim McDonnell, was the lead-off speaker for the first session of the Maryland Clean Energy Center’s Energy Economy Speaker Series. The topic was State of the Sector: Impacts of Covid-19 on the Energy Economy. Jim provided a broad energy market update and then focused on…

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Electricity and Rock: Still Not Friends

By Evelyn Teel In a previous blog post, we discussed findings from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) that the I-95 corridor is particularly at risk of grid outages in the event of a geomagnetic storm. You can read that blog post here: https://avalonenergy.us/2018/07/electricity-meet-rock/.  Further research has been conducted, and a new report from the USGS…

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Avalon Energy Services Turns 10 Years Old This Month

Late 2008/early 2009 was an unsettling time. Bear Stearns was bailed out, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, the housing market collapsed, credit markets were frozen, the stock market fell more than 40%, the unemployment rate was approaching 10%, and energy markets were in turmoil. The Great Recession was underway. Despite this uncertainty, during April of 2009,…

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Separate Paths – Part 2

By Ana Rasmussen, Intern Our last blog post Separate Paths – Part 1looked at how electricity distribution costs have been rising since 2008 and many of our readers have had questions about just why this is happening. In order to explore this, and to try to get some answers, I dove in and analyzed seven…

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Separate Paths – Part 1

By Ana Rasmussen, Intern Since the shale boom began in earnest during 2008, natural gas prices in the US wholesale market have fallen dramatically. Prices have hovered within the 2 to 6 dollar per million Btu (mmBtu) range over the last few years, with the prompt month NYMEX natural gas contract trading at a remarkably…

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Natural Gas and Electricity Are Parting Ways – Part 2

In our last article, Natural Gas and Electricity Are Parting Ways – Part 1, we explored the weakening correlation between wholesale natural gas prices and electricity prices in the Mid-Atlantic. While natural gas prices have fallen dramatically over the past seven years, and electricity prices have fallen as well, electricity prices have not fallen as…

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Natural Gas and Electricity Are Parting Ways – Part 1

In recent articles, we have explored the dramatic decline in natural gas prices over the past seven years. See These Are Days To Remember and10,000 Maniacs Were Right. In the US Mid-Atlantic, natural gas and electricity prices have, over time, tended to move together. While there has by no means been a perfect correlation between…

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