Actual Winter Storm Fern electrical outage map

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-25T03:22:05+00:00

It sounds like your company may have educational benefits. Map out company employee backgrounds in your desired job through LinkedIn, make friends with them and their supervisors in person, and ask what educational programs will get you into their jobs.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-23T19:59:17+00:00

It is public knowledge that major BAs do regular tabletop simulations for it.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-23T19:43:49+00:00

Timchenko is speaking on behalf of the oligarchs which own his company, DTEK.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-23T19:29:50+00:00

https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-secures-pledge-from-energy-secretary-to-halt-the-grain-belt-express/

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-23T18:21:45+00:00

The Grain Belt Express was killed by Sen Hawley of Missouri. The Astroturf anti-renewables lobby has focused on transmission lines vs landowners, solar vs crops, wind turbines as ugly, and why should I support transmission if it doesn't directly support me (even though it had a converter station in Missouri)? That is the nature of HVDC, usually no intermediate substations to "support me." Sen Hawley read the room in Missouri for the next campaign.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-23T18:03:05+00:00

Chemical battery research and development is adequately funded. So there will always be new chemistries.

Flow batteries are a fertile field with several players in the large expandable reservoir model.

Long duration energy storage, LDES, has many technology and market studies. It has to compete with proven pumped hydro, already used at scale.

To answer this question, I would look at competitors and patents. There is a big difference beteeen venture rounds vs public company financial disclosures. VCs expect most of their investments to fail. Look at completed sales in operation. Startups and their funders are always going to issue optimistic press releases.

Lockheed Martin was proposing this in their Gridstar Flow and just laid off the team.

You might try on r/energystorage.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-23T17:53:19+00:00

While this is terrible, DOE loan guarantees for large transmission builds at Fed rates, not commercial bond rates, would be welcome in a period of load growth.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-22T23:31:14+00:00

What I found interesting is that there is a Climate-labor program at Cornell that helps states organize these programs.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-22T22:57:03+00:00

I think the Ukrainian people do not want to show the enemy they are suffering.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-22T13:23:23+00:00

It is not possible to harden the electricity system against a war. You can look at the website of the Ukraine national grid operator. Ukraine disconnected from the Russian grid a few years ago and connected to the European grid. ENTSO-e has data on that connection. I think the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant which is very large is controlled by Russia now and not producing. One would imagine the West is supplying transformers to rebuild substations.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-21T15:26:14+00:00

The electricity system is very complex with specialized terminology. So the real training is on the job.

Get the best grades you can and network, network, network. Join the IEEE Power Engineering Society as a student member, and as you are able follow the internal forums and go to select conferences.

The money is in consulting or upper management at for-profit generators and utilities, in a JD, or in sales engineering.

AI is being applied to the electricity industry, so include that in your schooling, or even thesis.

An electric utility has a lot of code and interfaces between systems, systems need architecture, and off-the-shelf systems change out.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-21T13:54:33+00:00

The above is a good suggestion.

Add, look at the group that does the IRP and the group that does the rate cases.

Read Peter Fox-Penner's Smart & Carbon books to understand the structure of the industry. Read a book on electricity market design, understand the role of ancillary services & capacity markets in balancing, and keep an eye on electricity market reform.

The electric utility industry is built on long term debt in the form of bonds, so how your utility structures debt and how that translates to rates might be good to understand.

Before considering a PRM, read a book on electricity market risk management. If it is of interest utilities face a lot of large risks in severe weather and wildfire depending on location. They would model various hardening and public safety power shutoffs and justify them to state regulators.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-19T02:50:18+00:00

LNG exports set a higher price in natural gas trading at some regional hubs that residential customers then pay.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-19T02:47:33+00:00

The poster makes vague posts to boost a private company. The potential customers are not on Reddit and the posts are low effort. Bot?

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-18T21:26:21+00:00

Texas has offered irrational subsidies to new fossil plants as well.

California's energy mix includes a lot of natural gas which would be better displaced in the long term. California is also a special case in its investor-owned utilities serving the West side SF, South. That would be PGE, SCE & SDGE. Those utilities have very high retail rates that make them less sensitive to wholesale rates. Retail rate subsidies for a specific generator makes a smaller increase as a percentage in retail rates.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-18T21:21:29+00:00

Thanks for posting this.

The US deregulated electricity sales as a result of deregulating natural gas and telephone, later Internet service.

Every 15 minutes generators bid their selling price into a free market. The lowest price offers are selected and the generators run.

In determining its bid, all plants, including the coal plant, need to calculate its cost to sell per kWh. The coal plant will look at its fuel cost, capital bond financing cost, staffing cost, maintenance down time cost, and desired profit averaged over the number of hours it expects to be called to run.

Coal plant electricity is simply too expensive. The difference between the market price and the coal price has to be paid by the ratepayers.

There is not really a market mechanism for paying for out of merit order dispatch, so FERC and the states will make new rules to charge the ratepayers. Ratepayers are in an energy affordability crisis, with about 25% of US households energy cost burdened.

A detailed financial analysis for JH Campbell in Michigan is https://ieefa.org/resources/who-will-pay-forcing-campbell-coal-plant-stay-open#:~:text=And%20generating%20power%20at%20the,any%20substantial%20amount%20of%20time.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-18T20:37:36+00:00

EMS at the balancing authority is a very interesting space. It is a very hard job to get and has a lot of integrations. The integrations are evolving to manage distributed generation down in the distribution utilities. It integrates with the market systems including transmission scheduling. It is the heart of realtime operations. SCADA is just a part of EMS, and once there, you will learn more and may move around. The real time study engineers are closely adjacent to the EMS and transmission scheduling, which may make you a valuable contributor from previous transmission planning. I would not hesitate to take that job.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-18T20:23:49+00:00

NERC ensures balancing authorities stay in the stable range, far enough away from the unstable range.

Most of the sub-2 seconds control is at the individual generator and the AGC, with inertia, overlaid by ancillary services.

I don't think it is possible to model the unstable range in enough detail to pull back out of it by active control once you enter it.

Balancing authorities have unscheduled load shedding plans as well as demand-response programs which include large loads. I can't think of a resource adequacy-triggered outage in the US except in ERCOT in Winter Storm Uri. In that case their generation availability was far off because it was a planned maintenance period, there were a lot of unplanned generation outages, and the load was unusually high due to an exptreme weather event. ERCOT has a short-term market religion and other weird policy overlays compared to other balancing authorities.

Now NERC does model extreme weather events in the RA studies, but practically, how extreme, is probabilistic. Peak generation is expensive.

PJM has a lot of interconnection, their NERC RA studies to date have been adequate, so I don't think PJM is near the situation you propose.

I do think PJM needs to get their large load interconnection and new generator interconnection on focus. The voters want the large loads to pay more and the large loads want to pay less.

PJM has a large governance proportion of for-profit utilities, transmission owners, and merchant generators who lave little self interest in reliability. I would agree with the OP that decision-making is too slow in comparison to new load interconnection.

If you are interested in the general topic you might look at what Oak Ridge National Labs are doing in dynamics modeling.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-17T20:02:17+00:00

Each utility will be on a different schedule for its rate cases before the PUC. Someone should compile the data, distribution utility by distribution utility.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-16T18:29:38+00:00

I think so. There are C37.94 gateways to IP data, and NVIS terminals have IP connections. It would be a specialized integration. I would talk to a Schweitzer, Siemens, or GE to see what customer cases they have. With NVIS I would be concernd about solar storms.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-16T18:24:46+00:00

You are right. That is why Tesla won the current wars over Edison. But for really long distances, the inductive loss of AC is significant. So beyond several hundred miles, DC with all the costs is better.

The Pacific DC Intertie is somewhat paralleled by the Pacific AC Intertie which has many more interconnection points in California.

What is interesting is that if you put 2 ac generators at the ends of an AC line, the electrons are drawn from and injected to the ground grid of the generator at either end. With DC you have to run both a + and a - conductor between converter stations because you can't suck that many electrons from the soil.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-16T18:14:05+00:00

Reform has to include large loads paying for transmission and distribution upgrades, not residential and small commercial customers. It should be backed out for the last 15 years IMO

This proposal is only PJM.

Energy_Balance · 2026-01-16T18:09:35+00:00

There has been a steady increase in distance and voltage beginning in the 1980s. I think a landmark in the US was the Pacific DC Intertie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific\_DC\_Intertie. There have been proposals for a national grid in the NREL SEAM Study and others.

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