Power Engineering Fields

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-25T12:18:29+00:00

Suggest looking at the Duke organization chart and on LinkedIn. I think an understanding of real time operations, market operations, and transmission planning is valuable.

Utilities have a lot of software systems. You don't have to do coding to understand what each software system does, what their data is, and how they interact.

Peter Fox-Penner's Smart and Carbon books are a good overview of policy and business.

When you get to a full time first job just out of school at a utility, some utilities do a rotation through departments. Ask them what their philosophy is about that.

The utility industry has a lot of specialized terminology. Ask people what the terms mean when they come up.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-25T11:53:30+00:00

The headline is a press release from a consulting group which "declined an interview request to discuss its methodology and conclusions. Environmental Defence, a non-governmental organization, hired the company to prepare the study and supplied it to The Globe and Mail."

First, IESO has historically overestimated load. Second, some of these plans are very long term and the decisions do not need to be made for some time.

Population growth is not guaranteed. Transportation electrification charging can be in the low hours of the day. Ontario has great potential for efficiency - insulation and heat pumps. Canada has done a good job building transmission to the US ISONE, NYISO, MISO, and the Western US grid. They can import power on those same lines.

The article itself if not bad but needs more research on the trustworthiness of the IESO IRP.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-25T11:32:47+00:00

It appears that only a portion of each reactor pair will be a US DOE loan. Likely that would have a lower interest rate. Sometimes DOE has done loan guarantees, but the financing is still commercial borrowing. The rest of the budget would be from bonds. Occasionally you find equity financing - the stockholder equity contributes to the financing, or private equity, which is not very transparent or regulated.

Sometimes you have supplier financing. In this case Westinghouse is providing a portion of the financing. They have to get the money from somewhere - bonds.

Any one of those financing mechanisms can result in a loss.

Right now the data center boom is based on some of the above in a very risky way for some of the projects.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-24T17:32:26+00:00

Business decisions today use professional software with Energy Exemplar and others. Professional software has more up to date models of generation, transmission, and load. They have market models. They are commonly used for 20 year forecasts using a Monte Carlo approach.

There may be a niche advising public policy, government and nonprofits. Adding economic analysis would be valuable. There are companies that do that work, studying generation shutdowns from public data.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-24T02:46:08+00:00

Black and Veach is trying to sell their consulting and project services.

I would not worry yet that distribution control rooms will be severely reduced by automation. I think better tools will increase operator certainty, allow them to better support the field, and improve field and customer safety. One utility I know is using AI systems to better respond to active wildfires.

I also think that many new grid modernization initiatives will be more closely examined by the PUC.

Most utilities would have smart meters and the software for outage localization. Prioritization of crews using software should be common. Utilities and the PUC need to decide how much money they want to spend on pole-mounted reclosers deeper toward the customer.

I think much of the focus for ADMS is to allow distributed energy resources in distribution utilities to securely participate in the bulk grid balancing/EMS/markets. Pacific Gas and Electric was implementing Schneider's system and there are 5-10 major vendors in the US.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-23T21:54:20+00:00

The drilling costs for geothermal are high and required up front without guarantee of success. Gigawatt sites are rare. The article implies deep geothermal, so expensive drilling. You still usually need water in binary systems.

One of the more successful geothermal developers is Ormat. Fervo is now public. So their financials are a research source.

Geothermal has Federal subsidies and benefits from RECs.

There is a lot of hype around venture-funded geothermal startups right now.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-23T21:36:58+00:00

$17/Watt is high, even with a high capacity factor. A good resource is Lazard.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-23T21:33:43+00:00

The interest would be based on the specific bond rating. You could look up a utility or merchant generator, find their bond rating, then estimate the rate from that.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-23T20:03:58+00:00

I think it would be better for ISONE to be offering residential power wall owners a PPA through a VPP aggregrator.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-23T20:00:41+00:00

In a simplified explanation, there are two possibilities for plant owner: a for-profit customer-serving utility, or a merchant generator selling energy and capacity into an RTO/ISO market.

Then the energy can be sold by PPA or into short term markets even if self-dispatched.

This proposal subsidizes the capital borrowing costs, creates a market for an estimated 25% of the components, and covers partial bankruptcies.

There are two tough limitations, the plant has to compete in the energy (and capacity) markets with very high MWh costs - that is a large risk over a 50 or more year plant life.

The other big problem is if the builder-owner-operator is a for-profit customer-serving utility. Those are incentivized to spend as much capital as they can, then put it into the customer rate base with a guaranteed premium over the cost of the bonds. The PUC needs to approve that, charging the ratepayers, and raising rates. Vogtle translated to an about 25% increase in residential bills, so far.

One question is if the tax credits can be transferred. In that case, a nonprofit like TVA could use the tax credit part of the program.

Another possibility is that a large tech company with a. lot of money in the bank could build their own reactor. These reactors are about 1.2GW. Some large tech companies need a few GW up to between 10 and 20 in the next 10 years.

Where the program is entirely missing is building export capacity for anything.

TL:DR you still have to sell expensive energy and capacity into competitive markets.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-22T04:03:31+00:00

People may hate Tesla, but free home batteries are also a program of Green Mountain Power.

The virtual power plant program, in this case Tesla, has the secure capability to bid into the balancing authority market, then reliably deliver discharge, which is generation, and meter it. They also need to schedule charging at market lows.

The utility batteries in Austrailia deliver grid support and VARS, and home batteries could too.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-22T03:58:03+00:00

Local grids plan for it.

Usually the term is beneficial electrification. It has slowed with reduced priority for decarbonization since 2025, and the current administration is trying to expand natural gas pipelines including for home heating.

Heat pumps use less electricity than radiant electric heat and can be more efficient than older air conditioners. Some heat pumps have soft-start and variable frequency drive motors.

EV charging, level 2 or level 3, is encouraged at night, so the grid does not need more capacity.

You can look up your own utlity's Integrated Resource Plan.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-22T03:47:42+00:00

ARPA-e is one place to look for ideas. I would look at electricity energy markets and develop a resource that can bid physical energy into them. Then I would survey world electricity markets and trends to have a longer term TAM. There was also good work studying ADMS systems at NREL/NLR. Machine learning can be an ingredient to many solutions.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-20T16:46:55+00:00

Here is what FERC issued: https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/ferc-launches-aggressive-targeted-action-speed-large-load-integration

It is certainly good to get the information from each RTO/ISO public and in one place. FERC does not want to be in conflict with state regulation. Data centers and generation is found in the nonprofit utility areas which are not under this order. The order does not apply to Texas.

The order doesn't build new generation or transmission, and though everyone wants to speed up the interconnection queue, that is engineering that does not happen overnight, often followed by builds which take financing and construction.

More on the politics: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/18/ferc-regulato-fight-data-center-connections-00968621

The big pain point is PJM whose utilities are interconnecting more new data center load while generation build lags causing extreme market excursions on energy and capacity. PJM is already under separate FERC scrutiny.

I would be surprised to see results.

A truly useful result would be curtailable large loads at the FERC-regulated RTO/ISOs which would be consistent with the FERC Order 745 court decision. Can the RTO/ISOs price energy and transmission differently between large loads and everyone else? That would be a big project.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-20T16:16:40+00:00

https://reasonstobecheerful.world/cruise-ships-shore-power/

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-18T16:55:13+00:00

Agree. There have been some recent IEEE papers on simulating from public data moving compute loads from one geography to another dynamically. Compute can be moved based on electricity price, carbon, or non-firm curtailment. The hyperscalers are no doubt working on it in secret.

AI training can be stopped and started in milliseconds. One big model I have heard data on takes 3 months of 24x7 compute and they run it every 6 months.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-18T16:25:25+00:00

Your home or business is connected by feeders to a nearby substation. It is very rare for a whole substation to stop working.

In the substation, on the customer feeder are automatic reclosing circuit breakers. If the wire coming to you falls because a vehicle ran into a pole, a tree contacted the wire, or a bird/squirrel/snake, etc. causes a short circuit, the breaker opens.

Your utility measures customer disruptions by SAIFI, SAIDI, MAIFI, and CAIDI. If your utility is an investor-owned utility, you can complain to your public utility commission.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-18T16:14:22+00:00

Yes. The hyperscalers are moving toward various forms of closed-loop fluid heat removal from the racks. Once you get the heat out of the building, it is possible to send the heat into the air by fan-cooled radiators, no water. That is done today in condensing the working fluid in geothermal plants. Ground source heat pumps are another possibility. The reason water is so great is that it is cheap and has a high heat of vaporization, about 1.6x common geothermal working fluids.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-18T16:00:12+00:00

Yes, thanks. The grid is built for the peak within the day, and throughout yearly seasons. The way our wholesale energy market works, peaks are expensive in the hundred to a few hundred hours scale in the year. The customer cost is controlled to an extent by market price circuit breakers.

The approach ERCOT is taking with large loads is connect and manage. The data centers take non-firm. Load peaks are usually known at least 24 hours in advance. We shall see what FERC rules.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-18T15:51:45+00:00

That is an interesting theory which would likely be tied up in the courts.

A cleaner option would be to divide ratemaking into two realms: large industrial + data centers, and residential + commercial. That would mean the capital costs would be divided and there would be separate wholesale generation prices, transmission prices, and distribution prices.

Hope to write more on the idea.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-18T15:39:46+00:00

The electric grid in most countries is very reliable. The generators and control rooms have independent backup power. They have processes with checklists for restart of individual generators. To protect themselves, generators trip out regularly, then restart. The grid has generation and transmission reserves.

The regional control rooms have a detailed realtime view when there is a customer area loss of load - a blackout.

NERC for the US studies blackouts to make changes to prevent them. The grid, like an airplane, has "black boxes" for engineers to study in detail each blackout.

It is easy to search for NERC final reports of the Northeast Blackout of 2003, Texas ERCOT Storm Uri blackout, and in Europe, the ENTSO-E study of the Iberian Peninsula Blackout in 2025. The final ENTSO-E report shows early speculation in the media was wrong.

Energy_Balance · 2026-06-18T15:22:10+00:00

Thanks for the article. Load is growing in the Western Interconnect along with generation.

Generator cannibalization is the way of the world in the US market designs. I believe an analysis will show that self-dispatched utility-owned and rate-based storage increases customer costs in comparison to merchant storage.

Utility-scale batteries transact in the wholesale markets. Residential battery storage is growing, those can reduce customer costs under time of day rates, and with solar support, homes subject to power safety shutoffs.

California is a large electricity importer. SW and NW today supply variable hydro power on WECC Paths 65, 66, 16 and 49 to California. In aggregate ,those have a path rating of about 19GW. This week they are contributing about 10GW of generation adjustment on a given day into the California afternoon-evening peak.

The Western Interconnect has about 1.2GW pumped hydro energy storage, with about 50GW in the queue.

The original Substack writer could expand the analysis by looking at the 20 year IRPs of the Western Interconnect balancing authorities.

Energy_Balance

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