Peak eclipse from Zürich’s Negrellisteg over train tracks during peak solar eclipse (love the tiny crescent in lens flare reflecting the status of the eclipse 🌙)

These Static Mittens (pattern by Rows Knitwear/Alice Hoyle) are easily among my top 3 knits this year. The fact that the pattern name is electricity adjacent makes them extra special 🧶⚡️

TIL this guy, who posted this message when we announced @greencollective.io's move from X to here, recently started a bot on X posting daily updates on electricity usage/generation in Ireland 🙃 (Fairly sure it's the same dude I blocked, who had 4 bsky usernames to be annoying in my replies in Dec)

istg it always feels like it takes forever to finish the last bit of a ball 🧶

Even with limited experience in knitting, I am already convinced I will never regret frogging a project.

Diary of a novice knitter: Gotta accept sometimes you simply have to un-knit (aka “tink”, what a useful skill) rows and rows of stitches to fix a mistake. It was always going to take days, weeks, if not months to finish a full garment project anyway. But how I wish ctrl+z worked in knitting.

Great discussion on LNG in this new episode! If I may peddle 2 charts from us @greencollective.io: 1) Emissions from power sector are trending down, despite higher demand. No need for new LNG with more wind/solar/storage/interconnectors. 2) More gas guarantees higher power prices/higher bills.

Never seen a more perfect podcast show note tbh 💚 @climatealarmclock.bsky.social In all seriousness every 0.1 degree of warming we manage to limit is so so worth fighting for: peril and possibility coexist (from What If We Get It Right?).

Excellent day trip to Bletchley Park yesterday and always a joy to spot a beautiful cat (all cats are beautiful)

Christmas tree rental service increased the deposit 5x this season, and let me tell you, returned trees this week are looking so much better than last year's lot. P.S. Usually a bit nervous when we had to bring the tree into a busy bus, but ultimately it always works out just fine, as it should!

So are you saying the Dublin City Transport Plan did NOT scare people away from spending loads of money in city center? Maybe it's time for you to withdraw plans to seek judicial review of traffic rerouting measures then. (imho this article really should have at least mentioned the transport plan)

Regardless of the weather, walking on the beach on St Stephen's Day is my favo(u)rite Christmas tradition. But I have never come close to this shipwreck before? This vessel, called Eilean Glas, was sailing from Belfast to Devon carrying salt in 1980 but came too close to the shore. 📍Bettystown Beach

Overdue but @greencollective.io now has an Irish grid records dashboard: www.greencollective.io/records Highs of wind, solar, demand, battery discharge + lows of fossil fuels are displayed, plus output/demand ratio. Please allow a few seconds for the charts to load! Credit: @beerwithsubtitles.net

Bluesky's block feature is great, but this is the 4th account this one guy has made recently so he can leave comments/quote post like this. I know he is going to make a 5th account soon, read this, and repeat how he doesn't believe in renewables and storage. I will block you every time. Watch me.

This week feels like it has been going on for years, but hey, first snow arrived! Never not magical.

Yes to more wind farms in🇨🇭: the views are bound to be epic too. Exhibit 1: Windpark Gütsch in Canton Uri

lmao after 4+ years of running the Irish Energy Bot over there, a perfect sendoff from one of our most engaging haters. Well now you can follow us @greencollective.io for the usual charts and numbers.

For real! I remember reading this *perfect* novella, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Cillian Murphy’s new movie too), set in the 1980s and the feelings of horror (magdalene laundries) it evoked.

And of course I had to look up some data on cars on the train ride back from Rome... The map below shows the number of passenger cars per 1000 inhabitants across different regions in 2022. Exported from Eurostat and you can explore more here: ec.europa.eu/eurostat/dat...

THE motivating factor for using up my quota at the coworking space

The last UK coal power plant shuts down today! In Ireland, coal generation in 2024 only comes from 2 Moneypoint units. An Bord Pleanála will decide soon on the last coal units converting to oil (lower emissions than coal). Join our newsletter for updates like this: greencollective.io/newsletter 🔌💡

New report from Ember based on hourly data demonstrates the urgent need for clean flexibility, such as batteries and interconnectors, to complement wind and solar on the grid. 🔌💡 Proud to say @greencollective.bsky.social provided Irish hourly data for this report: ember-climate.org/insights/res...

it’s so rare for me to get a whole set of questions on university challenge, including the starter. But here comes last night’s picture round on energy transition metals. Guess the metal based on production level/share by country. (didn’t bother to take another pic of the last one, spoiler alert)

I can finally/barely find wholesale prices in those intimidating csv files from the grid operator, but the way they do it is a puzzling nightmare. For example these cells below are supposed to be the following in euro: 100, 87.88, 83.72, 84.75, 87, 92.9, 97.4, 110, 132. Oof who designed this?

Our #GetOutintheWind effort at Gütsch Windpark, one of the highest in Europe at ~2300m: a short hiking loop (public transit accessible) along 4 turbines (3.3MW since 2012; to repower/expand to 14.7MW). Can confirm these are QUIET: crickets and cowbells much louder! 📍Andermatt🇨🇭

Stay True by Hua Hsu: another nostalgic kick in the form of an extremely poignant memoir. Excited I will get to see him at Literatur Festival Zürich next month.

Last Summer at the Golden Hotel by Elyssa Friedland: frothy, gossipy, nostalgic. Very much the spirit of a summer beach read, though set in the mountains around labor day weekend. Made me look up the history of the Borscht Belt, which I very much appreciated.

If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga: took a little bit of time to get into it but I am very glad I did. (I give up books pretty easily, but something about her writing kept me going, then before I knew it I was hooked.) Also very creative format wise!

devoured this one! very tender and very kind: Tom Lake by Ann Patchett.

Batteries helped a lot, but some fossil fuel still had to be turned on, which led to high imbalance settlement prices. By early morning peak hours , a largely different group of batteries were selling when imbalance settlement prices were high, another key revenue stream for storage. (2/2) 🔌💡