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Protected: Transformers 101: A Basic Introduction

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Solar Power: Small Scale to Mass Production
"America is home to the best researchers, advanced manufacturers, and entrepreneurs in the world. There is no reason we cannot lead the planet in manufacturing solar panels and wind turbines, engineering the smart energy grid, and inspiring the next great companies that will be the titans of a new green energy economy." -Brad Schneider

Solar Panels, and Gardens, and Farms… Oh My! In September, the JCL Energy Journal took a look at the history of solar power and its pros and cons for the US Electric Grid. Whether you support traditional utilities, solar, or a mix of both, one thing is clear… The push for solar power isn’t going…

The History of American Electric Cooperatives
“The forward march of electric cooperatives has profound significance in terms of our fight to preserve the democracy.” -Franklin D. Roosevelt

Most of us understand the concept of cooperation. We learn to cooperate with our peers in grade school. We cooperate with our co-workers at our jobs. And we try (sometimes unsuccessfully) to cooperate with our extended family members at holiday dinners. But many Americans are less familiar with the term “electric cooperative.” If you grow…

Solar Energy vs. Traditional Utilities
“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy – sun, wind and tide… I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” -Thomas Edison

Hi, My Name Is: Solar Energy Last month, the JCL Energy Journal explored how electricity gets from power plant to you and took a look at how electric utilities work. As it usually happens, the more you know, the more questions that you have. One of those questions was about solar energy. We know it…

Behind the Scenes: Electric Utilities Explained
“Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.” -Karl Marx

Electric Utilities Explained Websters defines utility as “something useful; a useful thing.” To narrow it further, a public utility is “a public service, as a system to provide water or electricity, a railroad line, a cell tower network, or the like.” If you are anything like me, you’ve read the first two sentences and you’ve…

From Power Plant to You
“Electricity is really just organized lightning” (George Carlin)

The JCL Energy Journal recently took a look at the US Electric Grid to learn how the American power grid is organized, and how it functions as a whole. Now we go deeper and map the journey of electricity, from power plant to you. Electrical transformers are a huge piece of the infrastructure of the…

Extreme Weather and the Electric Grid
“Climate change is a controversial subject, right? People will debate whether there is climate change... that's a whole political debate that I don't want to get into. I want to talk about the frequency of extreme weather situations, which is not political.” -Andrew Cuomo

Today’s Forecast : Cloudy With a Chance of Power Outages Earlier this month the JCL Energy Journal took a look at the US Electric Grid. As we learned about how the grid was structured, we also learned another not-so-fun fact. Extreme weather is affecting the electric grid in increasingly detrimental ways each year. Lately, it…

The US Electric Grid: America’s Heartbeat
“The grid is awesomely complex. It is the largest machine in the world.” (Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future)

Let’s play a guessing game, see if you can guess what I’m describing… You use it everyday in many ways. You rely on it, but don’t often think about it. When it stops working, it causes massive problems. If you guessed the U.S. Electric Grid, you were correct! Our Electric Grid is a vast and…

American Energy: A Brief History
“Taking a longer look at America’s future, there can be neither sustained growth nor more jobs unless we continue to have an assured supply of energy to run our economy.” President Ford (1976)

American Energy Through the Years Despite what the marketing team at Dunkin Donuts tells you, the United States runs on electricity, not coffee. Currently, we are the second largest producer and consumer of electricity in the world. In fact, we consume about 20% of the world’s total electrical energy. American energy production has continually evolved…

“Let’s Get Physical” (An Inside Look at a Crypto Mining Rig)
“Bitcoin, and the ideas behind it, will be a disrupter to the traditional notions of currency. In the end, currency will be better for it.” -Edmund Moy (38th Director of the United States Mint)

The Physical Structure of a Crypto Mining Rig Last week, the JCL Energy Journal took a look at cryptocurrency mining. Crypto is a global phenomenon that most of us have heard of, and many are jumping onboard and investing. Independent investors and corporations alike are looking into building “mining farms.” However, if you want to…