Ric O'Connell
ED of GridLab dot org. Clean=reliable. Earnest cyclist.
- I wrote a short piece on lessons learned (so far, given what we know) from Spain on that other site. #EnergySky www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-h...
- Battersea Power Station. 500 MW of art deco power. Highly recommended if you are in London. Bar in the old control room! Lift to the top of one of the smokestacks! #EnergySky
- Touring Great Britain’s energy sector to learn about Flexibility with seven super sharp state commissioners. Hot takes coming soon. #EnergySky
- Elons $50B pay package is equivalent to $333,000 per employee. It’s just obscene.
- 🔌💡 #PJM published its final RRI list of "Queue Jumping" projects. Less batteries than the previous (now just 2.2 GW), and less gas upgrades (just 2 GW). 6 GW of new gas. Check out ~900 MW of new nuclear - that's Three Mile Island restart! Nearly 12GW of new resources online by 2030/31.
- 🔌💡So nice to see some yellow in #MISO and #PJM energy mix today. 12 GW of solar in each RTO! It's starting to get significant.
- @zeitlin.bsky.social gets it wrong here. We don't know if inertia would have helped (we don't really know anything yet). When the interconnection to France went down, Spain was *exporting* 2.5GW: the system would have gone into *high* frequency first, which could have kicked some plants off line.
- What happened in Spain is unknown, so we really need to wait until the post mortem to understand. That hasn't stopped folks for calling on Spain as an example for why we need "more dispatchable" resources. This is incredibly wrongheaded and lacks basic understanding of grid physics. #EnergySky 🧵
- What's up with the lack of batteries in PJM's queue? PJM has a queue jumping proposal (RRI) and 7.5 GW of batteries used RRI to jump to the head of the queue. This is the silver lining to the RRI, 10.5GW of gas is the dark cloud, luckily ~half of that is uprates at existing facilities.
- Happy Spring - MISO now at 12.5GW of solar, up nearly 10 GW from 2024. PJM closing in on 12 GW of solar. Let's get those queues unblocked and new clean resources online. Thanks to @gridstatus.io
- Great ShiftKey episode with my old friend @joannalewis.bsky.social on Chinese industrial policy. Joanna is so smart on this stuff and she also knows the best places to eat in Beijing. Trust me.
- Both the plane tickets that I purchased a month ago dropped 50% in price this week. Yes, crude dropped some but I think it’s a mainly a huge demand drop. Shit is about to get bad.
- I had to stop 15 minutes into the #BoilingPoint podcast from @sammyroth.bsky.social with @severinborenstein.bsky.social and Brad Heavner. It was ugly and personal. Sammy - I love your journalism - maybe find two less polarizing figures to talk about rooftop solar?
- The Toyota Prius Prime charging schedule is utter garbage. Useless.
- Pablo Vargas misspoke at House E&C: “Yes, that plan [EPA 111d] had risked more than 14,000 megawatts of existing coal plants that are serving the grid today, they would be at risk and that would be a significant reliability concern.” There are only about 8 GW online today. Lots offline. #EnergySky
- Here come the batteries! 26 GW of batteries! This installation curve is steeper than the early 2000's gas boom. It's the battery boom! #EnergySky
- #ERCOT screaming away at over 85% Carbon free again today, with negative prices. Fun to be in Austin for #ESIG when the grid is flexing like this. @gridstatus.io #EnergySky
- @jdeely.bsky.social any idea why @californiaiso.bsky.social is spiking over $1000/MWh right now? It's all over CA - so doesn't seem like it's congestion. Imports are strong. WHat's going on?
- @sammyroth.bsky.social says the fighting over rooftop solar is a colossal waste of time. I disagree. If we are going to decarbonize California, we want people to adopt heat pumps and EV's - and they won't do that if rates continue to skyrocket. A 🧵 #EnergySky www.latimes.com/environment/...
- @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social short piece for NYTimes is fantastic. This is a message that Democrats can rally around - a positive rubric. Blue states need to show that they can build again: housing, high speed rail, clean energy. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/o...
- I want to keep a running tally of how much solar you could have installed on TSLA lost market capitalization. So since peak, it's lost 700 GW of solar. (roughly $B per GW).
- It is endlessly frustrating to hear how #PJM needs new gas because they can't rely on all the variable sources in their queue. Their *record* of variable generation as a percentage of load? A measly 24%. ERCOT is 76%. SPP is 90%. MISO is 44%. Come on PJM, you can do better! #EnergySky
- @californiaiso.bsky.social - has only 16 GW of utility scale solar online, almost 10 GW less than #ERCOT (but if you add rooftop back in, CA is probably close to TX?). CA's record utility scale solar is ~19GW. But Solar is 60% of load in CA - only 50% in TX. #EnergySky @gridstatus.io
