John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋
@johnffarrell
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The guru of distributed energy, co-director @ilsr , host of Local Energy Rules, and unabashed nerd. I tweet for (energy) democracy.
Minneapolis
Joined October 2008
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What the
#Monopoly
#Utility
Model Really Costs Us –– a thread on my new report from
@ILSR
🧵
Care about
#CleanEnergy
?
#Climate
?
#Affordability
?
#Equity
? There's something for you >>>
#EnergyTwitter
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After what I’ve learned in the past year, here’s my pitch: we’re going about finding new grid capacity for clean energy and electrification all wrong. A thread. (And one caveat)
#transmission
#cleanenergy
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Inflation is a choice. And there are a lot of US corporate CEOs choosing to inflate profits at our expense. See also: eggs.
The latest inflation data is out.
The price of breakfast cereal is up 14% over the last year.
Post, General Mills and Kelloggs control about 80% of the market.
All 3 increased their profit margins in the most recent reporting period.
Corporations keep pushing up inflation.
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A gallon of gas nationally will cost you $3.26 and get you an average of 27 miles. That same $3.26 will buy enough electricity to send you 81 miles in an electric car, basically unchanged from a year ago. Go 3x further on $1, buy electric.
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This is a great time to uplift
@QueremosSol
and its work to build a more resilient grid in
#PuertoRico
focused on distributed energy resources. Their study shows it also costs less than rebuilding the failing system.
BREAKING: All of Puerto Rico — every town, neighborhood, house — is without power.
That’s 1.4 million households.
Winds over the southern portion of the island have gusted 80-100 mph, but elsewhere winds have been much lesser. Despite this, the grid is tenuous at best.
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In their own words, utilities say fight rooftop and community solar because it "presents a danger to utility shareholders." A reminder that most critiques of local solar are just a front for protecting utility profits.
#SolarEnergy
#monopoly
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We don't talk enough about gas disconnection as a major electrification barrier. I just spoke with a Mich. resident whose gas company wanted a $5000 ransom for disconnection! Regulators will approve this unless states make electrification a clear policy goal!
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Do utilities fight rooftop solar because it threatens their profits? YES. But don't take my word for it, take theirs. A utility expert witness for investor-owned utility Arizona Public Service lays it out in this rate case testimony:
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Hi all, the truth is that all electricity sources don't work sometimes. The sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow, the coal pile freezes, the gas pipeline depressurizes, the steam turbine fails. A reliable electricity system isn't X. It's many points of failure, and variety.
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Does rooftop solar actually help the climate? Yes. –– A response to the Shift Key podcast discussion between
@JesseJenkins
and
@emilypont
that gets a lot wrong about
#RooftopSolar
. THREAD.
#SolarEnergy
@robinsonmeyer
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A HUGE congratulations to the collective advocacy of Minnesota groups in the
@XcelEnergyMN
resource plan. No new gas, 2.5 gigawatts of new solar energy, and a promise to include distributed solar in future resource modeling. Thx
@CUB_MN
@votesolar
@FreshEnergy
@MCEA1974
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You know reviewing comments from the interconnection docket in Minnesota is going to be epic when the first comment contains this nugget––
@XcelEnergyMN
has told a rooftop solar customer they will have to wait ***15 years*** for interconnection review.
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You might have heard about the campaign to Save Solar in California, due to deliberations by state regulators to reduce compensation for solar producers. We're being played by utility lobbyists, my friends. Here's a thread 🧵
#solarenergy
#NEM
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This is such a hopeful piece about electrification. It makes WAY more sense to manage demand at the household level than to unnecessarily upgrade 50 million electrical service drops. Utilities should be offering demand response subsidies!
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😲 A Big Mac flipped by $22-an-hour workers...might cost about 27 cents more on average in Denmark than in the United States. That 27 cents is the price of dignity." Powerfully said,
@NickKristof
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This
@NREL
distributed wind study is excellent, particularly because it highlights how much wind power could be used to lower bills and build wealth in disadvantaged communities:
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Let’s take a minute to vividly illustrate why monopoly power in the electric business is bad, by way of Va. 1/
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Our mistake is expecting incumbent utilities to solve transmission problems just because they own transmission lines. WRONG. Utilities are not transmission problem solvers, *they are the problem*.
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Grid enhancing technologies such as dynamic line ratings and topology control software can expand grid capacity significantly (40%!) in a timeframe and payback period of months. h/t
@kgm2pers2
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@realDonaldTrump
Do you even know how elections work? Overseas voters, like service men and women, vote absentee.
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If anyone is trolling you about minerals use for clean energy, slap ‘em with this
@CanaryMediaInc
piece. All power gen uses minerals, but clean energy is *much* less resource intensive. .
This guy's got a shtick going where he either overstates numbers, uses pounds instead of tons so he can have more zeroes, or doesn't put anything into context so that number is big and scary. Keep in mind that 31.5 tons of copper can displace 21,000 tons of coal annually
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This is a TERRIFIC piece on the challenges of home electric panel capacity for electrification, including some great nods toward innovative solutions: Thank you,
@jeffsaintjohn
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Things I know at 43 I wish I’d known at 23. A non patronizing thread…🙄
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I'm often a quick critic of nuclear power for various reasons, but in a climate crisis it seems rather dumb to shutter a zero-carbon electricity source even if we could replace it with lower cost renewable electricity.
California Governor Newsom rethinking closure of Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, as application deadline for federal infrastructure funds nears.
“Some would say it’s the righteous and right climate decision,” Newsom said.
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More than 100,000 Mainers found that their new heat pumps worked well to keep them warm last winter. If your gas furnace goes out, start thinking about a switch:
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We are badly overpaying investor-owned electric utilities for low-risk use of capital, to the tune of billions of dollars per year.
Albert (correctly) notes that utility ROE's have slowly crept up. Back in the 80's the risk premium was about 3% and now they are over 8% low risk alternatives.
3/x
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SUM: If you are pro-transmission without also supporting serious structural reform of our
#transmission
planning and building process, without prioritizing upgrades to existing wires and distributed energy, then you aren’t serious about solving the transmission problem. /end
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Hey
@jack
, if
@exxonmobil
can promote tweets about natural gas, then
@Stphn_Lacey
should get the same treatment to promote one of the premier energy podcasts.
#EnergyAdFairness
#NoFossilFavors
Twitter once again rejected promotion of this tweet because it references climate content and is deemed “political.” It happens *every time* and it’s outrageous. This policy needs to end.
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Reconductoring transmission lines can expand capacity 2-3x at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time it takes to build new lines and towers.
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And in case you’re wondering — yes, rooftop solar can do it cost-competitively with any other type of solar because delivery costs are basically zero.
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California has 1.3 million solar customers. If they each spent $30k on solar, that's $39 billion in private capital -- more than the entire market cap of PG&E! Leverage that shit! Make the grid that welcomes distributed solar! /END
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Saw this yesterday and wanted to offer 8 ways we could move toward 30% solar rooftops in the U.S. without ratebasing. 🧵
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With incentives to own infrastructure, utilities PREFER building stupidly slow, expensive new infrastructure for their rate base over fast, efficient, capacity expanding transmission upgrades. 4 examples:
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"That is correct." Utility admits that "Investments made by [customers] with their own money [e.g. solar] may supplant investments that the utility may otherwise have been able to...earn a return on, for the benefit of their shareholders."
#monopoly
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Doing more regular audits of elections would be a really useful tool for reinforcing confidence.
Although Biden won (consistent with the polls), the Democrats suffered poll-defying down ballot losses. There was no blue wave. But Ds did nothing to demand robust manual audits of those losses. They rarely do. In short, Rs conduct
#fraudits
& Ds play dead. Happy medium pls?!
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If you had “rooftop and community solar cost the same as utility solar” on your 2023 bingo card, congrats! Local solar is competitive!
#solarpower
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You could wade into this intellectual discussion of how to reach 100% renewable, but I’d rather spend my time getting to the first 80% system-wide:
#100isNow
#Readyfor100
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Can we make it illegal to mention a docket in a news story or report without providing the docket number? It's like an empty footnote!
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Virtual power plants can serve local load and reduce peak demand, reducing transmission import capacity to cities and other load centers. Saul Griffith says local solar can serve 50%+ of needs in an electrified economy.
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Investor-owned utilities running rate increases through most state commissions.
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The mind-blowing fact? Emilia’s disclosure that most U.S. decarbonization grid models assumed the only method of transmission expansion was building new lines, not using any of the available tech to expand capacity. Crazy!
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There's an op-ed in the
@washingtonpost
that touts gas cars for staying warm in a winter traffic jam. It's like touting incandescent light bulbs for heating your house. What a ridiculous use case to use to advocate for a car fuel. And it's wrong.
What would you rather drive - gas or electric - in an epic traffic jam? A short thread to emphasize that running either type of car for cabin heating will use a lot of fuel, and that neither vehicle is designed for unlikely scenarios. (*napkin math warning*)🧵
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Anyone else notice how fast we went from “renewable energy is too expensive” to “we have to subsidize fossil fuels b/c they can’t compete”?
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@jamisonfoser
People talk about 2023 like elections are the only way control of the Senate flips. We're one heart attack or accident away from Republican control.
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Green Mountain Power's fleet of 27 MW of customer-sited, utility-financed batteries has shaved $3 million in peak energy costs for all customers. We need more programs like this, nationwide:
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What would you rather drive - gas or electric - in an epic traffic jam? A short thread to emphasize that running either type of car for cabin heating will use a lot of fuel, and that neither vehicle is designed for unlikely scenarios. (*napkin math warning*)🧵
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I'll wade in. California's rooftop solar mandate is one of the few policies that broadly share the economic benefits of solar, instead of concentrating profits among developers and utilities.
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Wow, A+ illustration of bank failures for context between now and the Great Recession.
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I’m 43 and this is the first dishwasher I’ve owned where everything comes out legitimately clean, even dishes with peanut butter or avocado or oatmeal residue. Did I just have lemons before?
#Bosch
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If we can do this for Florida, we should fix the grid in Puerto Rico. We are all Americans.
Utilities at their best: deploying at mass scale to maintain and upgrade the grid. More than ever, we need them centrally focused on this essential task. (📸: S. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel/AP)
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Nate and I are doing a podcast interview next week and this will be on the agenda. We need better alignment between electrification advocates and contractors or we're going to have a hella hard time with adoption.
$7500 for an installed ducted heat pump
@rewiringamerica
?!?!
The equipment alone costs more than that!
Stop setting up inflated expectations. You’re fucking those of us in the field. There’s no way to recover from this, consumers think we’re scamming them.
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By accident, ground-mounted solar installation increases growth of grasses suitable for grazing:
#SolarEnergy
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Dear
@NPR
, if a legislator voted for an unpaid $1.5 trillion tax cut, they are not a “fiscal conservative.” Thanks.
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Yet another of my irritations with the investor-owned electric utility model: the utter lack of bold moves to grab market share from gas stations and gas utilities. What other sector has a “double your profit, save your customers money” opportunity like this?
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Remember, one of the benefits of the investor-owned utility model is that you get to pay for alcoholic drinks for the pilot of the corporate jet. 34 times in 2020 alone.
#monopoly
#Minnesota
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We can also expand transmission capacity by building generation that conserves existing capacity. Wind-solar hybrids and distributed clean energy resources can serve the low-voltage side of substations and free up existing transmission capacity.
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The switch flipped when listening to the
@drvolts
Volts podcast with
@JasonTSConduct1
and Emilia Chojkiewicz. The current approach to high-voltage
#transmission
capacity is like building broadband with new copper wires and 56K modems.
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If you tire of someone from
#Minneapolis
talking about the Halloween snowstorm from 1991, this chart should help explain:
@chris_steller
@charlierybak
@bslotterback
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Such a cool story of self-reliance - farmers prefer older tractors they can fix themselves:
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Here's my question for all you smart climate thinkers: how do we reassure folks in the Midwest that they should electrify heating after this? I can already hear the "all the eggs in one basket" retorts...
@drvolts
@NobleIdeas
@energysmartohio
@JesseJenkins
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Here’s what utility innovation looks like — lobbying for laws to preemptively own all new transmission in their state:
.
@DanGearino
was already one of my favorite energy reporters, but I'm over the moon that he's covering this crucial and unexepected issue of electric utility interference with transmission expansion, the arcane "right of first refusal."
@venerable_bede
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We have a shot at saving the climate. Next let’s do democracy. 💪
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If you want to stick it to
#RussianAggression
, conserve fuel, buy an electric car, and do whatever you can to crater oil prices. Putin pays for war with oil profits.
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As an avowed lover of rooftop solar, this is the correct headline. There are tough policy choices sometimes, but in this we don't need to choose to win.
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@MichaelWWara
@JigarShahDC
@nytclimate
What's crazy is how much pressure we put on people to use less water (e.g. low flow showerheads) when the problem is really all in how we eat:
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@Andrew_2786
@rochash2
@WeddingCindy
@MeltdownWRIF
If most people who have it don't have symptoms, then how can people make an informed choice to wear or not wear a mask? And if masks are proven to help reduce transmission, then why are you so opposed to people wearing them?
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As
@POTUS
heads to
#PuertoRico
to survey hurricane damage, he should take
@MarkRuffalo
's recommendation to listen to our podcast with island resident Ingrid Vila about a better way to rebuild with local solar and batteries:
@QueremosSol
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I live 1500 miles from this paper's hometown and I'm tempted to take out a subscription just for the remarkable investigative journalism. The
@postandcourier
is the real deal.
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The NERA petition to murder rooftop solar is dismissed by federal regulators, but how many hours and dollars were spent by clean energy advocates to fight this pointlessly illegal move against solar rights? Now we need to play offense. How about 30 mil. solar rooftops?
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Dems gave up telling the truth about corporate power, leaving Republicans free to tell racist lies to explain why folks are falling behind. It’s anti-monopoly or anti-democracy.
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I'm super excited to hear that the US DOE Loan Programs Office under
@JigarShahDC
is looking to support innovative distributed energy resources aggregation under FERC Order 2222. Now if only the
@FTC
and
@FERC
would start looking at the utility monopoly power barrier...
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Opposing the deaths of children at the hands of the Israeli army is not antisemitism. Opposing the murder and hostage taking of Hamas is not anti-Palestinian.
@NickKristof
clarifies where the moral high ground is, as always:
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@MeghanMcCain
I'd ask instead what kids are learning outside of school. Did you know there's an entire news network with talking heads dedicated to misinformation, for example?
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My one caveat in my build transmission skepticism — new transmission that supports regional transfers. Reliability in a system dominated by variable production will be much better with stronger regional ties. If we build any new lines, focus on that:
🚨
#energytwitter
new
@mitceepr
paper out, summarizing the impacts of the BIG WIRES Act, which is proposed in Congress by
@Hickenlooper
and
@RepScottPeters
and would mandate each grid region to have Tx to transfer 30% of peak load to neighbors by 2035 🧵👇
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Infrastructure bill proposal: 30 million solar roofs. ☀ A $450 billion down payment puts thousands to work in good jobs, generates $20 billion per year in electricity savings (5% of all electricity), lowers pollution, and - with storage - provides resiliency to outages.
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Sending my condolences to
@AhmadFaruqui
for having to defend rooftop solar on Twitter after his appearance on the
@CanaryMediaInc
debate. It's not an either/or friends, but there's a power structure behind the utility scale model that explains why we're having this debate.
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Utilities subverting regional planning to build small, incremental “reliability” focused power lines to avoid competition:
One reason we can't get transmission built for large scale solar and wind projects is that utilities have gamed the planning system to favor their own interests.
@AriPeskoe
covers this chapter and verse in his work on the "utility transmission syndicate"
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This
@bradplumer
@nytimes
covers a super important issue for the clean energy transition: being able to connect to the grid. I have a few addenda... 🧵
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On
#energytwitter
, I see plenty of talk about time-of-use pricing, but I wonder if electricity being a monopoly has us overlooking the time value of action on climate change, and the opportunity to tap a much wider array of participants in our energy systems.
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How do you build a pro-climate electric utility like
@xcelenergy
? Here's a helpful timeline:
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Best explainer of the $350 billion per year Build Back Better bill. Why the fsck do I have to find this in a tweet thread instead of a newspaper. Oh right, because it’s more fun to do inside baseball on Manchin. Explain the bill beyond $$$,
@nytimes
@StarTribune
!
A brief thread to try and demystify the infrastructure convo in Washington, and hopefully correct some misconceptions:
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Oh look, former utility executives dominate the boards of “independent” system operators!
With fights over net metering and interconnection, we've gotten some clarity about how utility
#monopoly
power slows the clean energy transition. Now we're seeing how it impacts transmission deployment, as well.
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Listening to a fascinating
@FedSoc
panel on electricity markets.
@TKavulla
, discussing wildfires and giant political scandals of
@PGE4Me
and
@firstenergycorp
, asks "what would a regulated utility have to do to get its franchise revoked?"
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I'm seeing a lot of tweets about setting up a home office and just want to say that, for parents, it's not about comfortable space, music, etc, it's all about the small humans who desperately want your attention.
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30 times more jobs from rooftop solar than large-scale solar? That's what
@XcelEnergyMN
had to say in a Minnesota filing. Seems like a great tool for economic recovery! (do both)
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Or utilities trying to preempt nondiscriminatory regional planning:
We should not accept that regional
#transmission
operation be subject to monopoly utilities. Transmission should be planned and operated independent of entities with major conflicts of interest.
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This is a brilliant way of gathering data to help validate and secure elections, instead of throwing baseless accusations.
1/GA--Want to help your candidate, party, or election security from wherever you are tonight? If you have an internet connection and attention to detail, you can!
Task is saving all iterations of precinct results for a few counties for later reference.
Explainer ⬇️
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A reminder from Minnesota that gasoline cars lose range in winter. My summer "full range" in my minivan is 450 miles. Today, at 16 degrees, it's 358 miles.
#ElectricVehicles
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@carlquintanilla
@samboykin
@Anthony
And folks say women are too emotional for leadership positions...
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Summary so far: a debate about a solar "cost shift" is literally pure utility propaganda. Is there a legitimate discussion somewhere in here? Sure. Did we come about it honestly. Ha! If we did, we'd be asking about profit distribution, not just cost allocation.
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Just out,
@ilsr
's latest energy report explains how the 100-year era of top-down electric grid decision making has ended thanks to the entrance of affordable energy storage.
#solar
#EnergyStorage
1/
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I am a hiring manager at a public policy nonprofit. Here's my
#1
tip for qualified candidates to get an interview (and the biggest mistake most candidates make)...
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Our grids need to use every resource they have, which is what makes this use of electric vehicles to displace gas peakers is very exciting:
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