Chris Villarreal

@duncancampbell Some family members in Iowa have gone all in opposing data centers. Amongst their arguments is basically a prime farmland argument- can't put a data center on the farmland! Well, can they put up solar? Note- i don't agree w/a ban, but at least this one seems consistent.

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He promised to support the ministry of the cathedral and advocating for the archives and helping people to discover the significance of the Venerable Bede and his work. The Dean prayed for Tom and asked for God’s blessing on his work.

@tau18analytics @AriPeskoe @matthewstoller 2020 houstonchronicle.com/business/artic…

@venerable_bede @AriPeskoe @matthewstoller ... great pull !!! ... do you have a sense of the date range on that docket ... ? ... Thank You !!!

Massive fight by incumbent utilities to block competition in building interstate transmission, basically really long high-tech extension cords. eenews.net/articles/state…

@tau18analytics @AriPeskoe @matthewstoller It's been there if you know where to look. I'm reminded of when HEB got CenterPoint's rate case destroyed because of power quality issues.

@AriPeskoe @matthewstoller ... new "flavor" of demand emerging ... power quality. #powerquality

Interesting, competitive transmission projects come online faster and are 30% cheaper. utilitydive.com/news/competiti…

From my trip last year to Durham Cathedral to visit.

On point about the complaining. Where else in the world can households causally use 2MWh a year at 99.9+% availability and not be driven to the poorhouse. Spoiled by the good times.

Today is our nations Memorial Day. Enjoy your day and take a moment to remember the true meaning of this day. A day to pay our respects to all those who have given their lives in our country's defense. God bless these brave heroes and their families.

@JaneAFlegal Everything you've said in this thread is because of the flaws in the utility business model. For decades now utilities have blocked new entrants from bringing their own funding and tech to the party to protect their interests, not customers. That's what needs to change.

Until we agree on what we’re trying to solve, we’ll keep having the wrong fights and I’ll be bummed out. Now is a historic moment for these conversations and reforms and we can’t waste it on marginal stuff.

Okay. We do not have a shared problem definition on “electricity.” It’s fine to ask “are utilities greedy, “but that is not the question I think matters most. IMHO the right question is do we need to build to power and economic growth and decarb without screwing ratepayers?

Rest easy, Rob Base 🕊💙🙏🏾 I'll forever love this flowchart

Forcing refiners to blend liquified corn into their gasoline is one of the dumbest policies on the books, raising the cost of food and fuel for nonexistent environmental benefits. slowboring.com/p/the-dumb-pol…

@smithtjosh There is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program.

The next "green new deal" should look like Milton Friedman wrote it

I actually think @JaneAFlegal's concerns about philanthropy are in a funny way compatible with arguments @deanwball, @JoinFAI, and others have made about the overly precautionary and procedural inclinations embedded in, among other things, public and public-private institutions of science and innovation. A huge amount of philanthropy goes towards reifying regulatory and state capacity functions that hinder expeditious drug trials, technology licensing, infrastructure permitting, etc. Philanthropically supported NGOs routinely insert themselves into the feedback loop between government investment and civic outcomes, making claims to enforcing "democratic accountability" when they're actually just enforcing their own ideological preferences. This is a way in which tax-exempt wealth can undermine democracy—rich patrons using philanthropic giving to implicitly or explicitly obstruct state capacity. Billions of dollars in private wealth are channeled towards protecting existing zoning regulations, opposing nuclear power plants and transmission lines, the list goes on. That's not to say that wealth would automatically be better spent by the government. But if the government is bad at investing marginal dollars in sci/tech/services/whatever, it's important to understand that philanthropy often contributes to why they're bad at it in the first place! All of which is to say, I think it's hard to categorically prefer the philanthropic decision makers over the government ones, or vice versa, without more specifics about the decision makers and the decisions. I'm optimistic about the (if still comparatively minuscule) fields of abundance and progress philanthropy, largely because they attack the exact problem of government dysfunction.

8. On to the power supply side of the industry: Bring Your Own Generation is the way. Too bad it is literally unlawful in a majority of states!

A lesson I have learned today in asking whether we have the appropriate scale of philanthropy is that a lot of people hate government.

As is so often the case in utility regulation, things that look like customer protection measures are really... ratebase protection rackets!

@RicOConnell8 I know that reference. Ha ha

I don't want to kill capacity markets. I just want to shrink their importance so they are small enough I can drown them in the bathtub.

@duncancampbell Isn't that really the problem? They aren't designed for what's going on & when there is an opportunity for real & actual choice, the institutions dig in against it, b/c that's not in their nature. Bridges could be built to manage, but they have no incentive to do so.

Tbf, the grid and its institutions are failing to meet the challenge. Give these bros better options and they will take them!

FERC Chair Laura Swett read the riot act to PJM at its annual meeting yesterday

Bottom line: customers are paying more for transmission, but not seeing additional capacity or reduction in congestion costs. That means we're investing in the wrong things. We need planning reform and greater oversight of local transmission spending to address this conundrum. 3/