Brendan Pierpont
@brendan
Energy and climate nerd. Electricity @energyinnovation.org. Views are my own.
At some point, we'll realize that if we don't tax corporations and billionaires that are capturing most of the gains of economic growth, we'll go bankrupt, and then maybe we'll do something about it.
cheap MWhs from solar 🤝 cheap capacity from batteries via www.ethree.com/recost-2026-...
Texas's ERCOT electricity market hit a record electricity peak demand yesterday, and it was kind of a non-event thanks to abundant solar and energy storage. Graphs from @gridstatus.io
Get ready for higher natural gas and power prices... from BNEF via www.linkedin.com/posts/alex-w...
A great resource on fossil fuel price volatility and the benefits of clean energy transition from the Energy Transitions Commission. www.energy-transitions.org/publications...
I made a thing (well, Claude made a thing) to explore electricity generation trends by state. This is work in progress, but welcome feedback! bpierpont.github.io/state-genera...
NextEra and Dominion have proposed to merge into a mega utility. One interesting part of the proposal is buried here in the investor deck - proposing bill credits for Dominion customers! A sign of how much extra value NextEra sees in this deal...
Solar and storage are going to transform electricity markets for decades to come and we're just getting started. Really interesting analysis from IRENA on the cost of solar firmed with energy storage. www.irena.org/Publications...
The researchers at LBL have done a deep dive on rising distribution costs and what is driving them. Really great stuff: emp.lbl.gov/publications...
Word, when you have one word document open that is a couple MB in file size.
This data on state permitting timelines for clean energy projects speaks for itself. www.frontiersin.org/journals/sus...
Only a little disconcerting to hear that Anthropic's latest unreleased model hacked its way out of a secure sandbox computer environment, gained internet access, emailed a researcher and posted information to public websites. www-cdn.anthropic.com/53566bf5440a...
I mean, glad to see this de-escalate but 🤯 www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04...
Wow - in one shot, Codex managed to replicate the NERL ATB LCOE calculation in a single, callable python function. I pointed it to the ATB data parameters CSV and a page documenting their equations and 12 mins later (and it works, produces the same results).
Data centers flexing demand, with real workloads, with near-instantaneous response. Very cool to see the latest from Emerald AI: ngpartners.cdn.prismic.io/ngpartners/a...
One of the factors behind rising prices is that it's getting more difficult to build solar and wind projects to help meet surging demand. Local bans and restrictions are one reason why. www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...
Yeah - some northern rockies areas look alright but most of the US west is stark. Glad the Columbia River dams are in a better position. Thank you Canada!
If only there were a news organization that could dedicate investigative resources to verifying some of these claims.
Lots of folks sharing this scary-looking map from NERC. But it should be read as the highest-value places to build demand flexibility, large scale and distributed storage, energy efficiency over the next 4 years, which can be built much faster than new gas plants. www.nerc.com/globalassets...
Building a data center costs between $9-15 million per MW of IT load, BEFORE the cost of chips and servers (which multiply this cost by 4-5x). Some great data in this report: cushwake.cld.bz/Data-Center-...
Love for the grid to rely on a fuel that does this every time it gets cold:
I knew PNW snowpack was bad this year but 😱 projects.oregonlive.com/weather/hood...