Kyle Baranko

We're hiring! 6 new roles open at Paces across Customer Success, Solutions, and Sales. Know someone who'd be a great fit? Send them our way: hubs.la/Q045mMjR0

We scored 4,195 data center sites across Indiana and Texas. Two very different markets. One is shrinking fast. January Data Center Site Analysis (first in a monthly series) → hubs.la/Q042FM5W0

I recognize these ideas are laser-focused on a particular customer class (i.e. datacenters and other large industrial loads) and that I am sweeping over tons of complexity surrounding what is fair and just for residential customers. But I’d rather entertain a system designed to facilitate economic growth to the greatest extent possible, injecting subsidies for sensitive communities where appropriate, than one that fundamentally constrains us from reaching our next level as a civilization In the future, I hope to explore how we can expand this system to ensure it is sustainable and just for those beyond the industrial giants who have the resources to manage their own risk (but who are also currently keeping the US out of a recession)

With the introduction of this financial asset and an open, risk-seeking rate base, the incentives of everyone involved in this market for transmission capacity work together to maximize utilization of each node on the grid and direct private capital to the most lucrative places to increase headroom The queue would transform into a market of bids and asks on interconnection costs for both load and gen Whenever an entity considers developing an upgrade, they’d be responsible for auctioning off the transmission capacity (i.e. curtailment stack slots) and originating the right set of initial contracts with an entire market of load serving entities, large loads, and generators This would bypass the onerous need for firm delivery requirements and extensive network reliability modeling by enabling loads and gens to take curtailment risk at specific nodes And it would bypass the rate-setting process by passing through delivery costs as a commodity that all wholesale market participants must purchase if they want their electricity sold or delivered anywhere

Last month, I had the opportunity to participate in an awesome panel at the Type I Summit hosted by @MaxAWebster and @PresidioBitcoin The premise for our discussion was simple: if you were to rip up our existing electricity network and rebuild it from first principles, what would its end state look like? I believe any new, Platonic Form must escape two flaws of institutional design currently plaguing our grids: interconnection is procedural, and return on capex is fixed The solution is to let the spirit of Hayek flow through us: unshackle the rate base for private capital and create a market for grid headroom to monetize network expansion Here's how I think this could work and why it is valuable...

How it feels when mainstream tech opines on our urgent energy challenges

🚀 Meet Modular Reports from Paces: custom site intel in days, not months. Skip 12-week studies—tell us your key questions and get only the insights that matter: power, permitting, fiber, wetlands, sentiment + more. Learn more from @kyle__cb here: hubs.la/Q03XTCrg0

Paradoxically, regulatory capture is more likely to occur in environments where more regulations exist

@tradeoffmaxi Popularized by Malcom Gladwell in Outliers. Vast majority of hockey players have winter birthdays, all timed up with when comp league age cutoffs are

This is a very real thing, especially if you anticipate your child playing certain sports where size + physicality matter more. Few things in life are free but timing childbirth with this in mind is free upside for your child, athletically, socially, and even professionally.

Waiting months for consultant reports while the grid fills up? We built a better way: automated analysis + expert validation = due diligence in days @kyle__cb explains how Power Flow Studies, Risk Reports & CIA accelerate projects: hubs.la/Q03WSBhc0

Thank you for the sparks. Not the easy kind, the kind that force you to kill your ego, rethink the origins of value, energy, culture, and what it means to live freely in a world that treats freedom like a myth. Following your work over the years pulled me into the deep end of Bitcoin: the thermodynamics, the geopolitics, the philosophy, the history of money, the fragility of institutions, the beauty of proof-of-work. It changed how I see the world, how I build, how I write, even how I raise my kids. It pushed me to my limits and into the work I’m sharing today. A book built from a unique blend of academic and journalistic rigor, historic fact-checking, data, graphics, philosophy, and a dash of sci-fi imagination. There’s already a huge amount of Bitcoin literacy out there, but very few works that tackle Bitcoin and energy with this level of clarity, precision, and balance: from grid dynamics to mining incentives, from methane mitigation to AI scaling, from real-world miner operations to the emerging boomtowns shaped by digital energy. It’s the synthesis of everything I’ve learned on this journey, shaped by voices like yours, but forged through my own experience, research, and years of obsession. If it helps even one person see Bitcoin with the clarity you helped me find, that’s enough. If it reaches more than one, even better. 😀 Thank you for lighting the path. I’ll spend the next decade trying to light a few of my own. In no special order (except for the first two who both go for n.1): @DSBatten @thetrocro @TomerStrolight @whiteafrican @NealFlesher @LizardWizardBTC @Breedlove22 @AdamBLiv @adam3us @LudiMagistR @BitcoinPierre @brian_trollz @PierreNoizat @NickSzabo4 @JasonPLowery @nic_carter @kyle__cb @jyn_urso @SGBarbour @JoeNakamoto @mattkratter @Dennis_Porter_ @willywoo @resistancemoney @saifedean ...

Ironically, as generative AI commoditizes basic knowledge work, it places an even greater premium on highly generative people

@jakepusateri Lots of excel spreadsheets and documents feeding into power flow software like TARA and PSS/E. Computationally not hard but the data environment is a disaster

@kyle__cb What does the modeling look like right now? Excel spreadsheets? Computationally it doesn't seem like it should be that hard...

There is a weird, reflexive relationship between utilities and developers Developers submit speculative apps because they cannot accurately forecast what utilities will quote to connect Utilities cannot easily quote developers what it will cost to connect because they're inundated with speculative apps The natural response from utilities is to raise the barriers to entry via higher study fees and stricter standards But this doesn't actually solve the problem; they're just trying to shift the risk and chaos to other development swimlanes like site control or permitting Since utilities have no financial incentive to clean up this mess, the solution is to build a modeling system so advanced that it can let the developer forecast their speculative projects as deeply as the utility eventually will to disqualify the worst projects early Simple thermal heatmaps at substations produced by most software platforms won't cut it, and they are part of the problem I'm talking full power flow studies with security-constrained redispatch and fully-conditioned base cases Modeling depth at scale and with speed is the only way to go

@AlwaysBlueRE We’re doing our best + making tons of progress

@kyle__cb are there any startups doing this well?