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Blair Willcox

@currenttech.energy
621 followers 715 following 267 posts

Energy nerd, Michigan sports, skiing. Working to let market signals tell us when to use electricity to electrify and decarbonize process and space heating (including steam!)

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Blair Willcox
Allison Gill @muellershewrote.com · 09/10/2026
Regardless of the legality of posting armed national guard members at drop boxes, whether the boxes were open yet, or whether drop boxes qualify as polling sites under the law; the optics are what matter. Lawful or not, it’s overt, intentional voter suppression.
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
Free DC @freedcproject.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Soldiers positioned at voting locations is not legal behavior. These are Mississippi National Guard troops at a DC ballot dropbox yesterday. We demand the governors of Mississippi, Florida, and Georgia get your soldiers OUT NOW.
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
Ed Porter @edporter.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Germany: a two-hour battery earned €215k/MW/yr in September, with day-ahead spreads the widest since 2022. But revenues still fell 40% on the year. Wider spreads added money, nowhere near enough to replace what saturating aFRR markets took away. The ancillary premium is shrinking.
Chart: me bess de revenue stack
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 05/10/2026
Or we move renewable generation payments fully outside of the market and we just need to decide who holds the bag and how it’s paid for. But we aren’t going to see consumer surplus as capacity price increases will outpace savings, regardless of how cheap elec gets during highly renewable hours
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 05/10/2026
That would enable a lot of interesting contracts to create price floors for renewables, reenabling some chance for profits as a PPA holder or merchant IPP.
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 05/10/2026
We can set floors on those prices, at least for a while, if we can dispatch load where there is a clear avoided cost of non-electricity inputs (methane for heating or gasoline for vehicles). But these loads must be truly dispatchable and we must have elec price signals that ~match wholesale costs.
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 05/10/2026
Renewable generation can’t be financed without a PPA, even with potentially massive load growth. Price cannibalization eats all profit and subsidies. We will (have?) stall out the transition if relying on existing markets. Electricity during highly renewable hours will necessarily -> $0
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 12/09/2026
The Bryce running it in is also good.
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 06/09/2026
Not sure why Michigan’s all-maize uniforms have tails
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
RedditCFB @redditcfb.com · 05/09/2026
Colorado Mines vs Washburn is officially a tie in D2! While getting ready for OT, the air temperature hit 99° with a heat index of 108°, conference rules prevented resumption of play as long as wet bulb temperatures remained in an unsafe range and it wasn’t set to let up.
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 19/08/2026
But take a look at the recent think pieces in the UK trying to remove natural gas from the pricing merit order. There are significant savings from doing so, but the renewable offtakers always end up taking big losses and reduce the incentive to build more renewables.
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 19/08/2026
Sure and I’d argue that the Biden power plant regs pushed that vision by trying to eliminate base load natural gas and hours for peaker plants. But it’s hard to choose your marginal producer as you push through the merit order. Absent some fun anticompetitive withholding
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
David Roberts @volts.wtf · 06/08/2026
In July, on ABC, CBS, and NBC, there were 194 segments on the extreme heat waves rolling across the US. Number that mentioned climate change: 0.
mediamatters.org
ABC, CBS, and NBC aired nearly 200 segments about three U.S. heat events without mentioning climate change
From late June through July, successive heat waves swept across large portions of the United States, breaking temperature records and placing more than 100 million people at a time under heat alerts. ...
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 06/08/2026
Ugh but that’s not how infrared camera work. Surface temp yes! Interior temp no!
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
David Roberts @volts.wtf · 31/07/2026
Hot! Rocks!
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 19/07/2026
Taco trucks on every corner
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 25/06/2026
Probably more of a Rankine guy
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 24/06/2026
And then the US!
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
Vice Mayor Burhan Azeem @burhanazeem.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Most of our district, including the triple deckers everyone loves, was technically illegal to build. That's not an accident. It's the result of decades of rules that quietly banned the cheapest housing we ever built. Cambridge changed it last year. Every city in Massachusetts can too.
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
Allison Gill @muellershewrote.com · 19/05/2026
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Jan Rosenow @janrosenow.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
The world’s largest sand battery got through Finland’s harshest winter in years. 2,000 tonnes of sand, heated to 500-600°C by cheap power, feeding district heating in Pornainen. And it worked. Result from one install: oil down 100%, emissions down 70%. Industrial process heat is the real prize.
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 16/05/2026
This is a hysteresical take
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 15/05/2026
I don’t see any possible parallels. www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/banki...
The Panic of 1873 arose from investments in railroads. Railroads had expanded rapidly in the nineteenth century, and investors in many early projects had earned high returns. As the Gilded Age progressed, investment in railroads continued, but new projects outpaced demand for new capacity, and returns on railroad investments declined. In May and September 1873, stock market crashes in Vienna, Austria, prompted European investors to divest their holdings of American securities, particularly railroad bonds. Their divestment depressed the market, lowered prices on stocks and bonds, and impeded financing for railroad firms. Without cash to finance operations and refinance debts that came due, many railroad firms failed. Others defaulted on payments due to banks. This turmoil forced Jay Cooke and Co., a notable merchant bank, into bankruptcy on September 18. The bank was heavily invested in railroads, particularly Northern Pacific Railway.
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
Rebecca Dell @rebeccawdell.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
It turns out the LNG export capacity has been in the works for a long time. From EIA:
Planned additions to north American LNG export capacity, from EIA
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
Ari Berman @ariberman.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
This is absolutely outrageous. SCOTUS reinstated Texas gerrymander 15 weeks before primary because they claimed it was too close to election to block it but now allowing Alabama to gerrymander one week before primary after trial court found map was intentionally discriminatory against Black voters
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 08/05/2026
Today on Volts: how do you coordinate the behavior of millions of distributed energy devices so that they work to the benefit of the larger grid? My guest today argues that real-time, dynamic retail prices -- communicated directly to devices -- are the customer- & privacy-friendly answer.
volts.wtf
The case for using prices rather than VPPs to coordinate distributed energy
Researcher Bruce Nordman explains how dynamic, real-time pricing can do the work of coordinating DERs.
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 08/05/2026
priicer.com might be an option
priicer.com
Priicer - Set What You Want to Pay for Electricity
Priicer uses real-time electriciy prices to help you automatically consume electricity when power is cheap
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 07/05/2026
Taking these loads off grid would be such a missed opportunity for the grid and an indictment of our electrical system. The grid has lots of excess power and will have more and more excess renewables. Heat batteries are an obvious dispatchable load that could absorb those excesses.
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
Oilfield Witness @oilfieldwitness.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
This Is Not A Drill is out and free to watch on Patagonia's Youtube channel. @txsharon.bsky.social is one of three activists featured in the film.
youtube.com
This Is Not a Drill | Patagonia Films
YouTube video by Patagonia
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
Ian Carrillo @iansociologo.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
www.axios.com/local/nashvi...
axios.com
Blackburn pitches 9-0 GOP map for Tennessee after Supreme Court decision
Sen. Marsha Blackburn wants Tennessee to redraw its U.S. House map to help President Trump.
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
Ian Carrillo @iansociologo.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
bsky.app/profile/tani...
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Ian Carrillo @iansociologo.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Just hours after the ruling... These folks waste no time to advance racial disenfranchisement.
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 28/04/2026
"Electrifying industrial heat in India is now cheaper than producing heat from natural gas and oil across all temperatures, and cheaper than coal in three of five temperature bands, representing 55 percent of the country’s industrial heat needs."
energyinnovation.org
Electrifying Industrial Heat in India
Cheap solar prices mean electrifying industrial heat in India is cheaper than producing heat from most fossil fuels, cutting costs and air pollution.
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TerraWatts2010 @terrawatts2010.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Cache Energy’s pilot project harnesses excess wind power from UMN Morris’ two turbines to heat a carpentry shop and could be expanded across campus. 🔌💡 www.canarymedia.com/articles/lon...
canarymedia.com
A new thermal battery could help this Minnesota campus electrify heat
Cache Energy’s pilot project harnesses excess wind power from UMN Morris’ two turbines to heat a carpentry shop and could be expanded across campus.
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
PM2.5 Kills ~9 Million People Each Year Worldwide @tkovach.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
"In PJM alone, consumers are already on the hook for $16.6 billion in capacity costs tied to data center demand forecasts that industry experts widely expect to be wrong."
linkedin.com
The Data Center Reckoning: Why Communities Are Saying No — And What Has to Change
Something significant is happening in the space between the AI hype cycle and the real world. Communities are pushing back.
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
Mark Z. Jacobson @mzjacobson.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
Firebrick storage powered by WindWaterSolar electricity has huge potential to replace fossil furnaces at low cost web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/j... A Scotland distillery claims a world first - it produces & stores 1,200C heat with low and 0 carbon electricity, not fossils www.bbc.com/news/article...
web.stanford.edu
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
The National @scotnational.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
A Scottish distillery is to use otherwise wasted wind power to heat its stills in a 'world-first' decarbonised heat project 👇
thenational.scot
Whisky distillery to use wasted wind power to heat stills in 'world-first'
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 13/04/2026
Also worth understanding why we aren’t building wind (it’s not cost effective because of how the merit dispatch order works and price canibalization). Solar will not avoid this fate despite everyone’s excitement. The pricing system is not set up to support a 100% renewable future.
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 13/04/2026
Many residential heat pump evangelists are supporting hybrid systems and we really need to get the C&I community on board.
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 13/04/2026
Yeah. For the time being a hybrid natural gas + electric system is required for practicality and going to have lower system emissions during super cold operations. And you get to start arbitraging on price and avoid huge peak capacity upgrades.
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 11/04/2026
AtmosZero is primarily air source but can take other heat sources such as waste heat from cooling processes. Taking heat from condensate return wouldn’t really make sense unless you were dumping the condensate, which you’d want to avoid.
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 11/04/2026
New Belgium beers in Colorado and yes!
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
Jaap Burger @jaapburger.eu · 11/04/2026
The French government has announced the measures of its plan to accelerate electrification: - a ban on gas boilers in new houses from the end of 2026 - increased support for replacing old heating with heat pumps - 100 regions will pilot comprehensive heat transition plans to phase out gas by 2030
info.gouv.fr
Électrification : les mesures annoncées par le Gouvernement | info.gouv.fr
VIDÉO. Leasing social, pompes à chaleur, voitures électriques… : la France accélère son électrification pour réduire sa dépendance au gaz et au pétrole et renforcer sa souveraineté. Le soutien à l’électrification atteindra 10 milliards d’euros en 2030.
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Reposted by Blair Willcox
Jan Rosenow @janrosenow.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Heat batteries are a game changer for decarbonising heat. Polar Night Energy and Lahti Energia Oy have partnered to construct what is expected to become the world’s largest sand-based thermal energy storage system, to be built in Vääksy, Finland. www.environmentenergyleader.com/stories/worl...
environmentenergyleader.com
World's Largest Sand Battery to Supply District Heat in Finland - Environment+Energy Leader
A Finnish energy company is heating 2,400 tons of sand above 500°C to store renewable energy at scale. Can sand replace natural gas in district heating?
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 10/04/2026
I am also incredulous
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 10/04/2026
Truly this was a super stressful way to get to OT
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Alex Carstens @carstens13.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
We are here now
The Bois tweet
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Karl Jacoby @karl-jacoby.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
I am not one of those who believes that history repeats, but consider the following from Herodotus: the Oracle at Delphi told the fabulously wealthy King Croesus that if he invaded Persia he would "destroy a great empire." Croesus invaded and lost--the empire he destroyed was his own.
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Brandon Friedman @brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
The military must not follow any orders to destroy "a whole civilization." Sane members of Congress should say this loudly now.
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Blair Willcox @currenttech.energy · 02/02/2026
So good. Really a great episode broadly.
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