If you're going to be in the city anyway, stop into the Cable Car Museum. It's not just a museum, it's where they actually pull the cables.

The final report on last April's Spain/Portugal blackout is out. A few takeaways:

- Lack of "inertia" due to too few fossil/nuclear generators - the thing anti-renewable pundits immediately blamed without evidence, then reporters breathlessly endlessly repeated - played essentially no role.

Plus the people who are high earners and also benefiting from Prop 13 because they inherited a low tax rate etc. Those folks are also richer than they look on paper.

Implications of policy-driven transmission expansion for costs, emissions and reliability in the USA Nature Energy - Interregional transmission is key to a cost-efficient, reliable and cleaner US grid. Senga et al. find that current legislative proposals can increase reliability while capturing...

New paper out today in Nature Energy!
We evaluate how Congressional proposals for policy-driven transmission expansion would shape U.S. electricity costs, emissions, and reliability. Big implications for climate and grid planning.

rdcu.be/eS7lj

#EnergyPolicy #Transmission #CleanEnergy

Modeling Monday: How clean are EVs, really?
Short answer: it depends on the question. Attributional vs. consequential LCA, average vs. marginal, short- vs. long-run... the metric can flip the answer. 1/🧵

I'm dipping my toe back into the academic literature: who's got recommendations for good papers around transmission network reduction algorithms? 🔌💡

I promise to always boost anti-Prop 13 content, especially if it's got information and jokes.

Combustion turbines would seem to often be designed for similar flexibility, and not to have inertia only for its own sake.

ok but can we take a minute to think about CryShare? I had a baby who would not sleep, at all. very hard times. we were losing our minds. and I still would no sooner have handed the baby over to a stranger TO DRIVE HIM AROUND IN A CAR than saw off both my legs with a steak knife

UW students’ visas revoked without notice by Trump administration The University of Washington plans to provide the affected students access to legal services that are paid for by their student fees.

The University of Washington plans to provide the affected students access to legal services that are paid for by their student fees.

It was fun while it lasted

Hopefully this is a useful tool: findlostdata.org

I'm sure plenty of people have downloaded copies, but who's going to host something as canonical and convenient as NREL/EIA? This is a huge step back for the research community.

A Michigan city’s ‘sustainable energy utility’ got the green light from voters. What now? By creating a supplemental utility that will focus on scaling up rooftop solar, battery storage and microgrids, Ann Arbor, Michigan, is taking its clean energy future into its own hands, stakeholders ...

The fun story of Ann Arbor planning to build a duplicate distribution grid:

“I’ve explained this to people like, ‘This is the fifth-best solution, but solutions one through four are not viable for a variety of different reasons,’” Mathieu said. “Five is feasible. So, let’s do it.”

Energy Exemplar has blocked all TU Berlin students from academic licences for their energy modelling tool PLEXOS because competitor PyPSA is developed here. While deeply shocked, we believe in turning the other cheek. So we are offering all Energy Exemplar employees a free licence for PyPSA.

Dan Savage on blue America in the age of Trump Dan Savage joins me on Volts to discuss how NIMBY-captured city leadership is failing Democrats — and why making cities better is the key to building the party’s future.

Today on Volts: 20 years ago, @thestranger.com.web.brid.gy published a piece in the wake of GW Bush's 2004 reelection: "The Urban Archipelago." I talk with then-editor @dansavage.bsky.social about the politics of cities in a time of reactionary backlash. www.volts.wtf/p/dan-savage...

See also: the opioid epidemic and the downturn of brick-and-mortar retail

Thinking back to the impact of Hurricane Helene on the NOAA databases (among other things): what are the most urgent data backup needs?

Which companies (if any) are doing it right?

It should be indexed in a way that matches the context in which the data are being looked at. Follow 0- or 1-based indexing based on the programming language, or make it abundantly clear via context in e.g. data tables.

21st century Upton Sinclair

Because of the Inflation Reduction Act, other policies, & innovation, US installed solar & wind power capacity in 2030 is now projected to be double what it would have been before the start of the Biden Administration. Double! That’s good. Let’s do even more now. www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-roo...

10 GW/hr net load ramp in ERCOT 😬

source: www.gridstatus.io/total-solar-...

Sr. Software Development Engineer, Clean Energy, AWS Industry Products AWS Industry Products (AIP) is an AWS engineering organization chartered to build new AWS products by applying Amazon’s innovation mechanisms along with AWS digital technologies to real world industry...

Who wants to come work with us at AWS to help decarbonize power systems?

Does Rooftop Solar Actually Help the Climate? Inside episode five of Shift Key.

If you own a home, and install solar panels on it, are you doing anything to change how much fossil fuel gets burned in your region or around the world?

@emilypont.bsky.social joins @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social and @jessejenkins.bsky.social on SHIFT KEY to find the answer:

Software engineer looking to contribute towards the energy transition? 🌞🌬️🔋

Come to TU Berlin and develop PyPSA, one of the leading open energy system tools. PyPSA is used around the world to model our path to climate neutrality.

jobs.tu-berlin.de/en/job-posti...

Deadline: 15.3

Duration: 3 years

I'd guess that solving the SCED/SCUC is the biggest lift, so if you can find info on how well those problems parallelize, you're most of the way there (assuming that the tools are appropriately taking advantage of the amount of parallel compute made available to them)

Fascinating!

Do you have any gut feeling as to whether there's more room for new entrants to still be profitable, and if so, what penetration might be economic? Given the level of transmission between CAISO and the rest of WECC, how relevant is the CAISO penetration vs. the WECC penetration?

Why should we care about 'electrifying everything' as a goal of its own? I care about decarbonizing energy systems, and reducing emissions of other pollutants as well. If the best way to do that is electrifying everything, great. If not, that's fine too.

Betteridge's law of headlines