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Connor

@waldoch.bsky.social

2.8K followers 1K following 1.3K posts

Energy and other stuff. Some coding, some reading. Graphs and maps, birds and sports

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Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · Apr 20

the weather is nice, so we are back in the bird zone 🧵

all taken in a kayak with a canon r6 mk2 and the RF 800mm f11

I use a waterproof flyfishing bag from fishpond for the camera, but it's still a fraught endeavor

first up, some osprey action

#birds

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Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 3h

the grand arc of dismantling the voting rights act, going through its final phases

disenfranchising something like 10-40% of the citizens in those states that go full red, but, of course, it's not like they ever believed in democracy of their own volition

Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 6h

his wikipedia completes elides the diversity myth inflection point from his career, shoving it down into the Politics and Books sections

Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 6h

wanted to be a fancy lawyer, didn't get his dream job, gave up immediately to do other things instead, gets recruited to write a polemic and continues on from there

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Reposted by Connor

U.S. Soccer Men's National Team @usmnt.ussoccer.com · 19h

Haji is Wright twice tonight. We've got the lead!

#USMNT x VW

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Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 23h

utilities may decide to procure, but they're not coming to a rapid queue buildout any time soon

was thinking about this today looking at NYISO's STAR Report and unserved MWh estimates

it doesn't make sense to solve a 6 hour 1200 MWh unserved gap with LDES when you could have more flexible assets

Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 23h

I was on a panel at RE+ a couple years ago (about batteries, when I was a developer) and someone asked about LDES

My take then and now is similar to yours. In current market structures I don't see how they meaningfully compete with the (regularly improving) status quo batteries

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Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 1d

As someone who worked in hydropower, PSH is great, but vastly insufficient in comparison to the storage available to other commodities

Pumped storage projects are almost all bespoke, tailored to local conditions, and not easily replicable

They also have various tricky operational restrictions

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Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 2d

data there via @gridstatus.io

had some nice conversations with the folks on the story over the last month

Jan Rosenow @janrosenow.bsky.social · 2d

Grid scale batteries are changing our electricity system. Excellent new visual story on batteries in FT today shows just how far this technology has evolved.

Fasten your seatbelts, this is just the beginning.

ig.ft.com/mega-batteri...

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Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 4d

Not even trying to hide the grift off of every single announcement

youtu.be/5fTv9ThJg6U?...

the craziest insider trade i've seen in a while

YouTube video by voidzilla

youtu.be

Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 4d

Am I shocked there’s bunch of Nazi bullshit in a “proclamation” about Christopher Columbus? No

Am I surprised at just how much ahistorical online alt-right garbage they’re directly mainlining? Yeah, kinda

An IV drip of stormfront and 4chan in the vein of the nation with X as the needle

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Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 5d

Having written a blog a bit on that event I had to go check thinking “did some unholy auto correct error change lightning arrester?” (it did not)

I wonder how writing tools like grammarly that are now injecting LLM-phrase replacement stuff interact with more technical terms

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Reposted by Connor

Conor Sen @conorsen.bsky.social · 5d

In better news, Newsom signed SB-79.

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Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 5d

In other words, I can’t bring 2016 energy Twitter back, but just maybe

a group of people are sitting around a table and a man is saying now what we might be able to

ALT: a group of people are sitting around a table and a man is saying now what we might be able to

media.tenor.com

Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 5d

Insights is us, more Grid Status, but freed from the constraints of “has to be a blog or work on LinkedIn”.

Specific humans and quick notes filtered through our own experiences and perspective.

In my case, that means wide ranging energy items and even historical backfill as it comes to mind

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Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 5d

Finding new space in the "analyst" realm is challenging. There are decades of codified business rules, from teams on a desk up to purpose-built consulting practices, or the wave of new niche media, and today everyone is trying to sell you an AI bot built on aggregate knowledge, good or bad.

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Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 5d

This is now live at www.gridstatus.io/insights

The blogs will continue until morale improves, but we wanted to lean in on more timely notes on the markets.

Check it out and let us know what you’d like to see! 🔌💡

Couple other notes below

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Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 6d

RTO expansion presentation from August, nothing special, more of a guide doc for their new members (which can definitely be useful!, but it wasn't some big interesting thing haha)

Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 6d

same, SPP, same

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Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 6d

particularly interesting since they just finished the first part of a very large campus that is essentially next door and is continuing forward afaik

southeastern Wisconsin has been a big bet for Microsoft

wonder if the massive mystery project nearby soured locals more

bsky.app/profile/wald...

Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 26d

Microsoft wrote a blog post about a new (or perhaps fully operational?) datacenter of theirs in Wisconsin today

curiosity got the better of me and I bought the most recent high quality satellite image I could find (from March) 🔌💡

/1

blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09...

Inside the world’s most powerful AI datacenter - The Official Microsoft Blog

This week we have introduced a wave of purpose-built datacenters and infrastructure investments we are making around the world to support the global adoption of cutting-edge AI workloads and cloud ser...

blogs.microsoft.com

Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 6d

There will be overlap between this and the energy side of my feed

Expect an eclectic mix of market events, news, and stakeholder materials from our own specific perspectives, not faceless analysts or aggregate LLM output

Looking forward to figuring out what folks want to see in this context

Grid Status @gridstatus.io · 6d

A little teaser of our next product release: Grid Status Insights.

Insights is a real-time feed of expert commentary on energy markets and the electric grid — straight from our team of talented analysts.

If you’ve enjoyed our blogs or social posts, you’re going to love this. Stay tuned 🔌💡

Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 6d

thanks google, I'll be sure to check out the Electric Digital Authority Market that doesn't exist after I'm done reading about the Extended Day-Ahead Market (EDAM) that I was searching for something on

this is such a weirdly specific fuckup

Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 7d

the people at the top of these will make their money while absolutely demolishing credulity and momentum for other new nuclear along the way

or, they would, but the market seems willing to throw an awful lot of money at anything that can be related to data centers atm

Reposted by Connor

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 7d

i desperately want everyone involved in the destruction of USAID to have to, st the very least, answer to the american people for the suffering and misery they have caused apnews.com/article/myan...

Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said “no one has died" because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program.

apnews.com

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Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 7d

$700M for Crypto.com to have the naming rights to the Lakers arena, feel like that's sufficiently tech and wildly more

Connor @waldoch.bsky.social · 7d

I’m not surprised by the presence of people in American politics that fundamentally don’t believe in the American project, but I am perpetually shocked that their will is being carried out by so many variants of “that one weird dude in the forum that everyone dunks on for being insane”