Drew Smithee, PE
@DrewSmithee
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Recovering performance engineer / IRP analyst / wind turbine climber / pipeline planner. Sometimes fish and losing sports teams.
United States
Joined January 2015
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So I hear that
@Browns_Possum
is out, and the geriatric bunny is in. What say you
@Reflog_18
?
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Energy Twitter has struck a nerv. Apparently a lot of you experts don't know basic terms.
I hope this is a short thread but I'll add to it if I have to.
Tonight I present the first two concepts in this remedial crash course to IRP.
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WTF is this?
A recent study shows that electricity blackouts can be avoided across the nation — perhaps even during intense weather events — by switching to 100 percent clean and renewable energy, such as solar, wind and water energy.
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The most predictable problem ever
California's glut of midday PV is paradoxically also bad for solar itself. Solar erodes power prices by displacing more expensive fuel-burning resources, crushing prices it its own hours of generation.
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Tweet that will get traction: had beers with some guys I used to work with in coal plants and they all work in renewables now
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I can’t even make it past the first paragraph… wtf.
1,702 generating units at 127 GW of outages
FERC and NERC release the Winter Storm Elliott report, recommending the completion of cold weather reliability standards revisions and improvements to reliability for U.S. natural gas infrastructure:
#ReliabilityWeek
#WinterStormElliott
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Who wants to go in on building a giant toaster with me?
Here's a report on how ERCOT paid a single bitcoin operation $31.7 million in August to decrease it energy use to help stabilize the grid. Wonder how much tonight is going to cost...
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Punching above my weight for a job interview in the morning. Wish me luck.
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Nothing says work trip to Houston like a 3.5 hour vendor dinner at a second rate steak house
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Everyone’s talking about the new Westinghouse SMR, but have you seen cat turbine?
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It’s that time of year where the pollen goes away and migratory steam turbines return home from outage season.
Time-lapse of installing a 238 ton steam turbine rotor at the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant.
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What in the actual fuck? Lolololol
The U.S. Department of Defense takes Georgia Power to the woodshed in its IRP.
This awful stipulation will likely pass because I've never seen the Commissioners think for themselves but wow.
Kudos to DOD for speaking out.
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What if I told you 1 MCF = 1 MMBTU = 1 DT
Measuring gas by volume makes no sense. Mass or energy content only, please.
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Woah,
@MichaelEWebber
@joshdr83
@MBazilian
@gilbeaq
@emilygrubert
@Caitlin0903
and
@kyrib
are on the front page of Reddit right now on r/science.
That's like as internet famous as it gets.
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So who has the FERC order for dummies in a thread?
I know it takes time to read 1300 pages but I know some of you wrote it, so let’s have it
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I've apparently ruined my feed by clicking on one too many assassination tweets. In case you're going thru something similar here's a baby sea turtle I saw yesterday.
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Undergrounding transmission lines is not any easier to permit than overhead lines.
You still need to clear trees.
You still need to disturb habitat.
You still need all your permits and EIS.
You've just turned power lines into a pipeline. How has that gone lately?
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Something that just came to me about the gas/solar+battery duopoly I hadn't thought of before. As you charge batteries overnight on gas, you take away the time pipelines use to recover line pack for the morning peak.
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RIP Hydrogen market, 2023-2023.
News: Manchin says Treasury's long-awaited hydrogen tax credit guidance is coming next week -- and he's not pleased with it.
Joe Manchin Says ‘Horrible’ Hydrogen Tax Credit Rules Coming Next Week | Bloomberg
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Dear gas traders, I’m sorry for your loss.
EARLY SPRING: Punxsutawney Phil doesn't see his shadow and predicts an early spring!
#PunxsutawneyPhil
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Are developers still self insuring these days?
BREAKING: Hail storm in Damon texas on 3/24/24 destroys 1,000’s of acres of solar farms.
Who pays to fix this green energy?
@StateFarm
?
@FarmBureau
?
@Allstate
?
Or you the taxpayer?
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At this hour, there are 27,000 megawatts of wind power plants offline. Hopefully, the plant operators are just getting them ready for the heat next week, but this level of wind plant outages is actually beating the expected level (28,200MW) by ERCOT's definition.
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Utility execs:
Southern Company is extending the life of its coal units.
Net zero is so back.
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I don’t see this in the EIA tables anywhere
George McDonald cutting turf for burning in his home fire. He's been doing this since the mid 1970s using a special spade that is at least 100 years old.
Once dry, the peat bricks will be burnt to keep the home warm.
[📹 Awesome Earthmovers]
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Buddy of mine got laid off this week, expressed my condolences and the usual if I hear of anything.
His response: "Shit happens, my first job was at Enron so whatever"
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1. Reserve margin is NOT the same as operating reserves!
I've seen multiple articles mess this up, let alone countless tweets.
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Urban Planning Twitter: Americans need to give up their cars and take the train.
Americans:
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I would absolutely eat a wind turbine
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746MW / 35,659MW is spectacularly not windy.
2% contribution to peak. I wasn’t even this mean in my IRPs.
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Operating reserves is how much contingency reserve you carry at any given moment.
This is primarily covered in BAL-002.
Three main components. Non-spinning resources, reg up resources, and balance up resources. (I can cover these more in a 201 tweet if you pass this class).
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Pretty excited to hear about that 12GW in six billion tweets tomorrow.
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Reserve Margin is the percent capacity you carry over the forecasted peak load.
This is the number that drives new construction. It's a relatively stable number and determined thru LOLP studies.
13-17% is a sane number. 8% is scary thin (ERCOT) and 30% is super bloated (PJM)
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One of my better Proffesors in college had a saying that "a degree in engineering isn't a degree in physical science or solving equations but a degree in critical thinking and problem solving"
This tweet makes a key point that I also have been making for many years.
STEM teaches analytical thinking.
Humanities teach critical thinking.
We are having a national crisis in critical thinking, which means we have trouble distinguishing fact from fiction. That’s bad.
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The Freeport LNG root cause analysis looks like a Georgia Power IRP
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Absolutely based that FERC still calls it Twitter.
#EnergyTwitter
FERC staff issues 2024 Energy Primer: A Handbook of Energy Market Basics. This primer covers wholesale natural gas and electricity markets, gas-electric interdependency, crude oil, trading and capital markets, & market manipulation.
#EnergyTwitter
@FERC
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Oh look we've assigned death rates to individual power plants. Can't wait to read.
US coal power plants killed at least 460,000 people over the past 20 years - twice as many premature deaths as previously thought, with updated understanding of dangers of air pollution (PM2.5)
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I choose to blame ERCOT
China's major manufacturing hub Sichuan province has ordered all factories to shut down for 6 days to ease a power shortage. Sichuan is key for semiconductor/solar panel industries & China's lithium mining hub. Will hit Foxconn, Intel, Apple, Tesla-supplier factories & more
@cnn
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Successfully politicized lunch
This is a recipe for disaster. The federal government has no business telling American families how to cook their dinner. I can tell you the last thing that would ever leave my house is the gas stove that we cook on.
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Dawg, are we going to start naming individual clouds?
4 major winter storms within the first 12 days of 2024.
#Gerri
brining blizzard conditions to the Midwest as the next storm
#Heather
hammers the west. This system treks east this weekend-next week to bring potential ❄️SNOW❄️to the Mid South.
@weatherchannel
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Asking the real questions
if Josh sees his shadow this morning? six more miles of sewers.
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Imagine being at 97% of the all time peak load and making $7/MWh
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It is so hot in Texas you *almost* have to pay for waha gas.
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I swear PJM capacity prices is some guy in a windowless office going, "nope, last year's prices were too low", then the next year going "nope, last year's prices were too high".
PJM capacity market prices are posted and what a jump! Changed construct with ELCC derates, retirements, and increased load showing up at $269.92/MW-day for much of the PJM footprint, compared to $28.92/MW-day for the 2024/2025 auction
#energytwitter
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I can imagine the first meeting between the system planner and the project manager... "You want to put a pipeline where?"
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Perfect example of why transmission won’t fix this.
SPP and PJM were both under EEAs and didn’t have power to export. MISO was in better shape than neighbors
My assumption is market prices distorted by maxed unit commitments
Sure build transmission AND generation to go with it
"Transmission would fix this" exhibit umpteen-thousand and four.
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Want to see me get flames on Twitter?
I still cap my support at 2 license renewals. 100 year old plants are a bad idea. There I said it.
Unless it’s legitimately a ship of Theseus but I don’t trust 100 year old water mains.
Mind-blowing fact: nuclear plants may get better, not worse, as they age.
Most nuclear plants may end up being functionally immortal, with replacement parts, safety-related conservative design, and rising popular support.
From
@WorldNuclear
's 2024 report now launching online.
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I feel attacked.
NEW: Electric bills are too damn high.
Rates have increased as much as 90% over the last 15 years as utility companies hike prices more than ever before.
There’s a massive bribery and corruption scheme fueling the skyrocketing bills.
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Someone definitely got stuck taking delivery of a futures contract.
Around 40,000 pounds of sweet potatoes were given out for FREE Saturday by Smith’s Soul Food Bistro in Gastonia. 😮🥔🍠 More:
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So was cranky about work yesterday, and got drunk and applied to a job... Interview is monday. Wish me luck! Lol
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Me every Tuesday morning during staff meetings:
"No more electricity, sir. We have enough. We have enough."
Trump: We will be creating so much electricity that you'll be saying, please, please, president, we don't want any more electricity. We can't stand it. You'll be begging me. No more electricity, sir. We have enough. We have enough.
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Yo, they're arguing against substations now
On Nov 2, Boston voters get a say on a proposed electrical substation in East Boston, which will endanger the community's lives with no demonstrated benefit. Reject this reckless idea and vote NO on Ballot Question 2.
#NoEastieSubstation
#Neversource
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By age 30 you should have aided in the planning or construction of at least 5GWs of Combustion Turbines, Combined Cycles, Wind and Solar, as well as hydro and nuclear uprates.
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Yeah, I'm still thinking this is the weirdest nuclear account on all of EnergyTwitter
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#EnergyTwitter
is about to be unbearable. The character limit is the only thing keeping y’all in check.
Twitter will soon add ability to attach long-form text to tweets, ending absurdity of notepad screenshots
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@CMPD
You should probably watch one of the live streams of your officers then if that's what they're telling you.
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Two groups of people I would expect to know if it was going to be windy: sailors and crane operators
#EXCLUSIVE
SailGP has cancelled the second day of events after a wild storm. Incredible footage
@dailytelegraph
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@JesseJenkins
This isn't a piece of the truck market, it's a lifestyle vehicle. These are people that 20 years ago would have bought an AMG or Humvee or whatever else was trendy.
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Just sized a pipeline to serve a solar PV module factory, AMA.
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Call me old school.
This is the most well-designed image of the US electrical grid I’ve ever seen.
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I mean we could start selling gas stoves with 70,000 btu burners if boil time is that important?
Attention everyone: the gas vs electric vs induction flamewar has officially been won permanently by the 10 kilowatt stove
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95% confidence interval gas will be between $1.50 and $12 lol
We expect
#naturalgas
prices at the Henry Hub to average around $3.40 per million British thermal units this year.
That price is 47% lower than in 2022.
#STEO
➡️
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I was at the bar the other day and people were talking energy
I keep my mouth shut because I want nothing to do with it.
Bartender: "Hey, Drew knows a bunch about this. It's fascinating"
Me *Fuck*: proceeds to explain grid basics
Guy: yeah but *shitty headline talking point*
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I think this is Jebel Ali M-Station which is part of a large water desalination plant.
Between plants D E G K L and M there is 9GW on site and will be expanded to 13 GW.
Got into Dubai late last night. Opened up my curtains in my hotel this morning to what I now know is the largest single site natural gas power generation facility in the world. Fitting. I am going to stare at this through the haze of pollution for two weeks. Welcome to
#cop28
.
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The engineer in me wants to add the other transformer, and inverter, ...and switches, and circuit breakers, and current transformers... (10 minutes later)... and capacitor banks.
How electricity gets to your home ⚡️🏡
From my coloring book about clean energy!
Waitlist here
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I size gas mains for new subdivisions every day.
You would not believe how upset developers get if you can't serve them. I've seen entire subdivisions get scrapped because they couldn't get gas in X number of months.
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🍿🍿
Western US braces for loss of
#solar
-powered generation during annular eclipse |
#power
#electricity
#US
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If memory serves me the GE cold weather package is good down to -20 degrees.
So how bad is the wind forecast going to miss in SPP and MISO?
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What a cluster fuck.
Drone footage of the Kemper coal plant imploding yesterday—a $7.5 billion facility that never worked.
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As we reflect on this season of blackouts I remind myself of every time an intervenor told me my reserve margin was bloated or my load forecast was bullshit.
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Always read the footnotes
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Ok who wants to hear the story of my first renewables control rooms?
It starts with Doug.
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All this talk about twitter dying. This is what will do it.
A visualization of the 4000 character tweets coming soon (h/t
@BasicAppleGuy
).
Are you looking forward to having more characters?
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Of all the articles to have a paywall…
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I met the con ed guy who’d make this call… he knew it was coming years ago.
Also, holy shit.
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Just drunkenly submitted a three year old resume to develop renewables projects. Wish me luck my future boss can’t read!
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Here's one for the electrify everything crowd, I just got a request to review an install for gas streetlights like it's 1821.
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Can anyone confirm that:
1: CAISO Didnt order load shedding
2: Utilities did shed load
3: It was because of confusion over an EEA3 Alert
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My new bold prediction. We just end up with a very explicit NERC rule about reserve margin.
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It’s a substation, on wheels 👀
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Why can't I tie 3,000,000,000 watts into my breaker? Rude.
To illustrate why it's unfortunate that permitting reform doesn't address interconnection: a new cluster study by Santee Cooper assigns $3bn in upgrades to 3GW of PV (>$1000/kW) - an astronomical figure that could kill most of the cluster. 1/5
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Time to stand up against big math
It’s Pi Day (3.14). This is just a fake holiday made up by mathematicians to sell more math.
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Why? Because you don't understand what you're reading. You're comparing plastic distribution lines which are not FERC regulated and don't receive the treatment you think you're talking about.
A little bit of knowledge can be dangerous folks.
Over the past decade, we’ve built 5x (!) as many miles of natural gas pipelines as electric transmission lines.
Why?
Because pipelines receive preferential regulatory treatment.
Fixing this discrepancy is critical for transporting new solar & wind energy to where people live.
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You're welcome ratepayers, I just ordered the house bourbon in my old fashioned with dinner tonight.
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As an old boss once said:
"The reward for good work is... more work"
Python script is now 500 lines and processing 120 million records.
Creating more questions than answers at this point.
FML, hire a real data scientist.
I've started writing a lot more python and vba code at work after a five year hiatus. I can't tell if this is the best or worst idea I've had in a long time.
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I know my casting is getting better because I’m getting stuck in trees on the other side of the river now.
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Updated rule: now you build three combined cycles compared to the previously proposed two or the current one.
The
@EPA
finalized rules today to limit the pollution from power plants that drives climate change.
New rules will require existing coal plants to capture 90% of their CO2 emissions by 2032 or retire before 2039. New gas plants also face emissions limits.
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