Catherine (Katherine) Blunt

speaker

106 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2022 last heard Sep 2022

Catherine (Katherine) Blunt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

WSJ Your Money Briefing · Solving the U.S. Energy Crisis and Lowering Your Bills · 1 Aug 2022 podcast

So this is a relatively new phenomenon.

I believe the U.S.

really began exporting LNG around 2015, and the amounts that we've been sending abroad have been ramping up since then.

And right now there's a huge demand in Europe for LNG because European countries are looking to dramatically reduce their reliance on Russia.

And so as a result, there's demand for alternative suppliers, and the U.S.

is certainly one of them.

And so as more gets shipped abroad, it creates competition between

domestically for that resource.

The recent increase in electricity prices poses challenges on multiple fronts.

And it's largely driven by the increase in the price of natural gas, because natural gas is used to produce a lot of the electricity that we consume.

And so as it becomes more expensive for utilities to produce power or purchase power and deliver it to customers, those costs are passed on.

And these increases come at a really challenging time because utilities across the country are looking to spend billions of dollars in upgrading the grid to address issues with climate change, concerns about the need to reduce carbon emissions, and prepare for a surge in demand related to electric vehicles and other things.

And so it becomes harder for these companies to make those investments and collect more money from customers when bills are already increasing.

Now, building wind and solar farms has recently become much less expensive.

You have seen those costs increase in the last year plus because of supply chain challenges and other things.

But it is still less expensive in many cases than other forms of power generation.

And so there's a strong argument that the more of this we build, costs will come down over time because utilities will have to purchase less fuel.

But that's a long-term proposition and the near-term challenges are very acute.

A big part of the bill is dedicated to trying to speed the build out of renewable energy.

And there's talk of a separate legislation that could help ease some of the permitting hurdles that clean energy projects face.

Showing 81–100 of 106 · page 5 of 6