HN user
I'm into energy and the environment.
Strategy/Founder @ gridstatus.io
Not mentioned, but later on a gas turbine was built on site with some of the existing transmission infrastructure, and there’s also the Cross Sound Cable there, coming over from New Haven and connecting NYISO and ISO-NE.
Possibly not mentioned because some of the adjacent site is still very much used due to those facilities, making it even easier to be caught trespassing.
The classic pre-EPA slogan comes to mind: "the solution to pollution is dilution".
What did Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have to say about student loan forgiveness?
Who not only fights tooth and nail against healthcare improvements but actively took money from existing programs to fund a national police and detainment apparatus?
Which party produced the most meaningful (albeit not far enough) healthcare reform of the 21st century in the US?
Those examples in particular are quite rough to try and both sides.
Maybe a good start if you're a specific flavor of person, but it would be pretty amazing to claim it's an objective observer of "freedom" when the Freedom Index is a John Birch Society project, which is an ultraconservative advocacy group.
Just because it's called the freedom index, doesn't mean it's concerned with the freedom of all man, look to the civil rights movement for easy examples of how JBS' "freedom" is only for certain people.
Hell, click over to the JBS website and you'll see Alex Jones and Steve Bannon front and center on their home page. It's crazy to refer to one of their projects as some neutral arbiter.
"ideological subsidies" for this administration means any policy supporting non-thermal and non-battery (to a lesser extent, although their lobby has pretty successfully extracted them from previous renewable associations they relied on) generating units.
To get more specific, you could say everything rolled back from the IRA as part of the BBB.
You could go to the source and see[1].
TotalEnergies has committed to invest approximately $1 billion—the value of its renounced offshore wind leases—in oil and natural gas and LNG production in the United States. Following their new investment, the United States will reimburse the company dollar-for-dollar, up to the amount they paid in lease purchases for offshore wind. Under this innovative agreement driven by President Donald J. Trump’s Energy Dominance Agenda, the American people will no longer pay for ideological subsidies that benefited only the unreliable and costly offshore wind industry.
For its part, TotalEnergies will invest $928MM, on the following projects in 2026:
The development of Train 1 to 4 of Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas; The development of upstream conventional oil in Gulf of America and of shale gas production. Following TotalEnergies’ $928 million in investments in affordable, reliable and secure U.S. energy projects, the United States will terminate the following leases and reimburse the company
[1] https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-and-totalenergies...
The feds have dropped their attempts to stop those from ongoing construction for now, but only one of those projects is complete.
CVOW is supposed to flow first power this month, but won't be done for ~a year, Empire Wind is also end of '26/early '27, Sunrise later in 2027.
Vineyard was completed this month, and Revolution is delivering power and targets completion over the next few months.
Per the piece, they only began to step away from Delve once they realized they couldn't close the deals they wanted and their hand was forced by outside asks.
And then also it took a rather large data leak later on to provide extra ammunition to decide and go forward with publishing this.
I'm glad they did, but there are a bunch of steps in between pure balls/altruism and what actually happened based on the blog.
Delve seems clearly scummy, but dear god the author's company was also engaging in fraud with their own customers and just hoping to skate by.
"The trouble starts when you look at the answers Delve’s AI provided. Based on what your Delve policies claim, the questionnaire AI answers questions stating you have an MDM, had a 200 hour pen-test performed, and do regular backup restoration simulations. Tens of questions are answered like that. Great, you just lied to your vendor but at least you have a good shot at landing the deal. So what did we do? We kept our mouths shut."
Pretty rotten stuff. I went from energy into the software startup world and as I've gotten further down that road and energy has become more and more of a hot field I've encountered a depressing increase in that "just do it to make a deal" ethos, but in critical infrastructure.
Like, no, former Apple PM who learned about an interconnection queue from ChatGPT last week, you are not going to fix the grid, and even moreso you can't "just do X and ask forgiveness later", not in electricity.
I will have to let my wife and many folks she worked with who were illegally terminated, then brought back into uncertain limbo and so on throughout the year that someone on the internet is certain that none of this happened and 2025 was just a bad dream. Their projects and programs still exist and have been progressing well the same as they were 18 months ago.
LinkedIn is also a great example of this stuff at the moment. Every day I see posts where someone clearly took a slide or a diagram from somewhere, then had ChatGPT "make it better" and write text for them to post along with it. Words get mangled, charts no longer make sense, but these people clearly aren't reading anything they're posting.
It's not like LinkedIn was great before, but the business-influencer incentives there seem to have really juiced nonsense content that all feels gratingly similar. Probably doesn't help that I work in energy which in this moment has attracted a tremendous number of hangers-on looking for a hit from the data center money funnel.
As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes.
I have an appreciation for very bright lamps, and the project is neat, but that stuck out to me.
I'm always fascinated by people who both feel comfortable ignoring maybe the single most impactful society-determining apparatus but will also say "no one could have seen that coming", where that is whatever they were unaware of because they chose to check out. I find the stance so fascinating because for myself, it would be impossible to not try and understand why the world is the way it is.
Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not, and choosing to ignore it is, in fact, a political choice.
That's not what that image means at all. If you look closely, you'll even see 3 additional colors, plus white, from the 4 I'm guessing you identified.
Those are ERCOT load zones, a distinct concept and all within the ERCOT interconnection (grid).
On the markets side, Texas is made up of ERCOT, and then has portions in (descending order) MISO, SPP, and the non-market West.
In terms of "grids" Texas is mostly ERCOT, and then the Eastern Interconnection with a small smidge of Western Interconnection in the far west in El Paso Electric's territory.
That's cool to see, obiously Fermi has had them as someone else mentioned.
I grew up in Kane County, in the 90s it was the edge of the suburban-rural interface of Chicagoland (used to be the last commuter rail stop from the city).
Random fun tidbit is the WW1 code-breaking[0] that took place there as well, which today remains an acoustics lab[1].
[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20220521185943/https://northwest...
Yup, was just dead for me and stayed dead, so I went and grabbed an archived link.
Don’t recall precisely how it was dead, but I assumed via traffic.
Despite the massive PPAs that have already been signed on a chunk of the plant’s planned output I also find it very hard to believe.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems called dibs on next last year by saying they’re gonna have a Dominion (Virginia) commercial site up and running in the early 2030s.
https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-system...
Second US organized market to do so, and third in the region, after NY(ISO) and Ontario (IESO).
With HQ there as well, it’s actually quite a large coal-free chunk of grid.
What will be interesting is the extent to which offshore wind and imports from HQ will be able to materialize according to plan. OSW is having a hatchet being taken to it in the US currently, and imports from HQ into NY and NE have been way down recently while big new lines are also built.
Not exactly in the ISO forecasts, but very much supported by state policy has been the rapid expansion of behind the meter solar in New England. Really taken the edge off of summer days in particular, although also susceptible to smoke from Canadian wildfires.
Not the most exciting markets day-to-day, but interesting long-term things happening.
imo, that's basically the dirty secret of grid data, post 9/11 it seemed as if everything went behind the CEII wall, but in reality it has always been that if you're a legacy player or have the money you can make sure you have access to everything.
It's a thorny issue and something I ponder in my day-to-day[0]. We're members in ISOs where it makes sense, and can provide CEII data once we've confirmed customers already have access, but I would love to be able to show some of it publicly. It's also odd how things vary from market to market. Transmission outages: public everywhere, except ERCOT, where they're considered Secure. Generator bids: anonymized and delayed by up to 90 days everywhere, except ERCOT, where it's 60-days and not anonymized at all (yes, ERCOT is different wrt to FERC jurisdiction).
Years ago I worked at a market monitor[1], and we got everything, just cloning the changes to ISO databases overnight every day, second-by-second PI (plant information) data, it was awesome. The potential advantages from data asymmetry are big enough that there are multiple companies with physical sensors out in the world measuring power lines in different ways to try and reconstruct grid activity in real time, and then others doing it entirely from access to CEII and a deep understanding of how the grid function. But all of this is heavily oriented towards traders, not developers, although I would use trading tools when developing projects because they were the most advanced.
They’ve steadily expanded over the years, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was real. It’s not just calculators, TI chips show up in a lot of military hardware in particular.
Also already building a new fab up in Sherman, Texas.
Fabs have pretty decent electricity demand, I actually sited a battery against that one after we did a bit of modeling with the new load vs the solar flows in the area. Siting just means make a land deal, figure out easements, and start working its way through the queue. Might not ever get built though, lot of money and hurdles in the way ha.
Every time I see an industrial announcement like this power is the first thing I think of - where it’s gonna come from and what impact it will have on the existing grid.
Bluesky has really exploded in certain niches over the past week, I think my followers have gone up 5-6x since Saturday.
I'd been a somewhat active user over the past year as conversation on the field I work in (energy) become so degraded on Twitter as to make it kind of worthless (mean in multiple senses of the word as well as ludicrous levels of spam), but Bluesky was pretty relaxed without a lot of traction, now there's some real heat to it as things pick up.
Hopefully this surge is real, has certianly gotten me to be much more active.
This is more people just casually conflating two separate terms: geothermal and ground-source. Pretty frustrating since it is right there in the name of each, ground-source heat pumps are near-surface and basically leveraging the annual average air temperature while geothermal resources are leveraging higher temperatures much deeper in the earth.
Pretty much. He also authored an opinion today against the EPA's good neighbor rule. Directly continuing the work of his mother, who was head of the EPA during the early Reagan years until she was forced to resign as even within that administration she was flagrantly unwilling to do her job of enforcing regs to prevent pollution while also illegally utilizing the power of the office for personal politics.
Always strikes me as weird that the clear through line from her time in power to his own jurisprudence on environmental issues doesn't come up more.
Heyo everyone, cool to see this here. I'm a co-founder and head of product at Grid Status if anyone has specific questions about the site. I see some energy market questions here about CAISO and natural gas, net load, etc., so here's a link to a blog we wrote last year that covers some of these topics, might be helpful[0]. The market has been setting a bunch of records recently, which you can see here[1].
Also, as a bonus, if you click this link[2] while logged in it will enable a preview of our nodal price map app which people tend to enjoy playing around with.
[0] https://blog.gridstatus.io/balancing-act/ [1] https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso [2] https://www.gridstatus.io/map?nodalMapPreview
Folks here seemed to like the last eclipse dashboard, so I thought I'd post our pre-cursor blog here for the upcoming one as well. There's also a link to a new eclipse page[0] that will start filling in with data as we get closer to Monday and more forecasts become available.
Since the last eclipse in October we've done quite a bit of new engineering on the site, including a complete refresh on our charting library and a bunch of new features (custom dashboards, alerts, etc.). There's also a national nodal price map coming soon. We have a preview link in the blog post, but I'll also post it here[1] (click on it while logged in and the preview will be enabled). Happy to answer any questions or tag team in our CEO/engineering lead @kmax12
[0] https://www.gridstatus.io/total-solar-eclipse?ref=blog.grids... [1] https://www.gridstatus.io/map?nodalMapPreview
It’s even a bit funnier than you put it since on net they consume electricity due to round trip efficiency losses.
This also can provide something of an interesting discussion with local authorities when trying to site a battery somewhere that has banned new “generating” technologies (typically targeted at wind and solar), since batteries are consuming electricity and can be likened to transmission infrastructure (or physical trade assets which I think some people are enjoying playing with).
Those early reg-d PJM batteries also got absolutely physically wrecked, so it wasn’t the best outcome.
ERCOT is quite different from PJM when it comes to AS - the market is very deep and the operational needs are increasing in a way they aren’t in PJM (yet). Couple that with a vastly easier permitting regime and hugely faster interconnection process for a facility (batteries) that require relatively little land compared to conventional generators, and Texas has enabled ERCOT’s queue to become absolutely stuffed full of battery applications.
PJM was ahead of the ball on market design, but that was a (relatively) long time ago. Now they’re in the midst of their massive backlog queue transition and also revamping (for the nth time) facets of their capacity market.
That’s not why it is done, it’s because this is reporting in capacity and that is the physical capacity being installed. That phrasing makes it sound nefarious, then you end with a fairly low solar range (which varies substantially and exceeds that in sunnier parts of the US).
Bit of an odd take. You could say the same, or lower, of capacity factors on peaking oil or gas plants in some areas that run for only a couple percent of the year. Nameplate and utilization are just different things.
Maybe worth noting that despite lower capacity factors and despite it being mid-winter, Texas (ERCOT) keeps setting solar output records because they’re installing so much nameplate[1]. It’s not like it does nothing.
[1] https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Sol...