Please consider this a public thank-you letter to @AustinEnergy for working around the clock to get the power back on and prevent an even bigger catastrophe.
People are mad. But believe me, it could have been worse. Their good decisions staved off a complete disaster. [THREAD]
In May 2020 I wrote for @ASMEdotorg that I considered utility workers to be society’s hidden heroes – after the Texas energy crisis I believe that is even more true today than before.
But we also need to recognize how heroic they were. Line workers climbed ladders in icy, snowy, cold conditions to replace equipment, clear lines of fallen branches, and to get the electrons flowing again.
It’s fine to be mad b/c this was a crisis. But we also need to recognize that utility leaders like @AustinEnergyGM were forced to make tough decisions. Some decisions, such as winterization, were quiet, spread out over years, and behind-the-scenes, but yielded great benefits.
I didn’t like going without power for 2.5 days. But if @AustinEnergyGM and @paulaGW and other utility leaders hadn’t taken swift action, then I might have been out of power for 2.5 weeks or 2.5 months.
The Texas Energy Crisis makes me think of thermal energy storage for system resilience.
Can storage reduce electricity consumption? An equation for the grid-wide efficiency impact of using cooling thermal energy storage for load shifting doi.org/10.1088/1748-9… via @IOPscience
With a battery for energy storage it's an energy loser: 90% charging efficiency & 90% discharging efficiency gives 81% round-trip efficiency.
But with thermal storage, the system efficiency can actually be greater than 100% compared w/ baseline. How is that possible?
Power plants, transmission lines and A/Cs all have lower efficiency when it's hot. By using thermal storage we can charge the system (such as making ice or chilling water) at night when it's cooler and when those systems have higher performance.
I know there’s a lot of #EnergyTwitter discussion about electric heating as part of a society-wide decarbonization strategy. Let me share with you some details about how this might look in France.
In brief: it will be hard to electrify heating in France. [THREAD]
Here is the rate of energy use across all sectors for the entire country of France in a year with typical weather. The peak demand occurs in the evening of January or February and is driven primarily by the need to heat buildings.
The peak demand of ~280 GW in France is met by:
~85 GW electricity
~105 GW gas
~50 GW biomass & district heating/cooling
~45 GW of oil/coal
The lowest demand in the summer holidays is ¼ of peak demand.
I teach Entrepreneurship @UTAustin w/ @ATI_UT so I think about biz models.
Viral videos have their own biz model but I never knew the details until I had my own. My video of Paris traffic had ~5M views and I earned $495.01 from news orgs to show it.
I earned ~$0.0001/view, which is a good data point to have. Generally speaking for other social media platforms of content creators I estimate the monetizable value to be ~$0.01 to $0.10 per follower/subscriber, 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than a random one-off viral video.
I also discovered there is an entire cottage industry of media companies that reach out to owners of viral videos to help manage licenses for a cut of the fees. As my video was taking off about a half dozen companies DM'ed me saying they can handle licenses for a cut of the fees.
Hey #EnergyTwitter – Tulsa is in the news for many reasons. The 1921 race massacre, Trump’s rally last month, and the recent Supreme Court ruling. But Tulsa and Oklahoma are important to the history of energy and have been featured in Hollywood films. [A Thread]
If you want to read a fascinating book about how Native Americans in Oklahoma were murdered for their oil, then read “Killers of the Flower Moon”
The Osage Murders overlapped with the birth of the FBI. The book is in development for a movie directed by Martin Scorsese @scorsesemartin and starring Leonardo Di Caprio @LeoDiCaprio and Robert De Niro
A key Trump slogan was “Trump Digs Coal”. Many news articles justified it as part of a broader play for “working class voters”. Sometimes they would color their wording to clarify “white working class voters.”
The assumption was that he was looking for $$ from coal mine owners. But is that really it? The coal industry only supported his campaign with $223,000 in donations, which is a drop in the bucket for a multi-hundred million dollar presidential campaign.
In 1999 I was about a year from graduating with my PhD at Stanford University. I applied for a job at McKinsey. Sentences 2-4 nail it. [Thread]
"The power industry fascinates me because, in my opinion, energy is the most fundamental commodity in modern society."
Before developing countries can access the internet, pave roads, or efficiently harvest crops, they require energy. Moreover, the combination of deregulation and active investment in developing regions of the world make for an exciting industry that should be enduring...
...significant growth over the next decade."
I still agree with what I wrote 21 years ago. Oh, McKinsey rejected me. Thank goodness. My life would have been so different. [END]