cwal37

For those who don’t know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act

(which also banned box office receipt futures)

A fun thing is to go on FRED and make a graph with prices from onions and, say, corn to see the differences in volatility.

I did briefly consider something along those lines, but shoreline and marshlands are materially different, plus they've already changed the text.

I wonder if anyone read the copy on this page or if it mostly came out of an LLM.

The "Restoring the shoreline" and Rebuilding the marshlands" paragraphs below the images are almost exactly the same. The first sentence is exactly the same.

I saw the first article on thick art. This was linked within that article.

I enjoyed reading both, then popped over to see if this one had ever been submitted to HN. It hadn't, so I did. Figured that if people liked the first one, they might like this one as well.

The map is ok, but mostly I'm interested in the number of map apps people are cranking out with AI. The design elements pretty clearly mark them as such (and it's even more obvious once you poke around a bit). I love maps, so I get it, they tend to hook people, and the relative density of information can be very high.

I work in the electricity space (and of course we have a map[0]), and it has been wild to see the number of "I was a PM at a B2B SaaS/AI company and now I'm here to solve the grid with this vibe-coded tool", which inevitably involves a map. Seems like an inflection point was hit sometime late last year where first SMEs could make little apps they couldn't before, and then it expanded further into people who truly don't know a space but the AI can make it look like they do to other people who also don't, and the cycle continues.

[0] https://www.gridstatus.io/map?zoom=4.45&center=-95.70000,40....

*utility-scale solar, not solar overall

The solution to pollution is dilution was a philosophy prior to modern environmental protection laws, which were a reaction to the fact that we were absolutely destroying all kinds of ecosystems, even when we thought we were just diluting toxins down to nothing.

Not mentioned, but later on a gas turbine was built on site with some of the existing transmission infrastructure, and there’s also the Cross Sound Cable there, coming over from New Haven and connecting NYISO and ISO-NE.

Possibly not mentioned because some of the adjacent site is still very much used due to those facilities, making it even easier to be caught trespassing.

The classic pre-EPA slogan comes to mind: "the solution to pollution is dilution".

What did Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have to say about student loan forgiveness?

Who not only fights tooth and nail against healthcare improvements but actively took money from existing programs to fund a national police and detainment apparatus?

Which party produced the most meaningful (albeit not far enough) healthcare reform of the 21st century in the US?

Those examples in particular are quite rough to try and both sides.

Maybe a good start if you're a specific flavor of person, but it would be pretty amazing to claim it's an objective observer of "freedom" when the Freedom Index is a John Birch Society project, which is an ultraconservative advocacy group.

Just because it's called the freedom index, doesn't mean it's concerned with the freedom of all man, look to the civil rights movement for easy examples of how JBS' "freedom" is only for certain people.

Hell, click over to the JBS website and you'll see Alex Jones and Steve Bannon front and center on their home page. It's crazy to refer to one of their projects as some neutral arbiter.

"ideological subsidies" for this administration means any policy supporting non-thermal and non-battery (to a lesser extent, although their lobby has pretty successfully extracted them from previous renewable associations they relied on) generating units.

To get more specific, you could say everything rolled back from the IRA as part of the BBB.

You could go to the source and see[1].

> TotalEnergies has committed to invest approximately $1 billion—the value of its renounced offshore wind leases—in oil and natural gas and LNG production in the United States. Following their new investment, the United States will reimburse the company dollar-for-dollar, up to the amount they paid in lease purchases for offshore wind. Under this innovative agreement driven by President Donald J. Trump’s Energy Dominance Agenda, the American people will no longer pay for ideological subsidies that benefited only the unreliable and costly offshore wind industry.

> For its part, TotalEnergies will invest $928MM, on the following projects in 2026:

The development of Train 1 to 4 of Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas; The development of upstream conventional oil in Gulf of America and of shale gas production. Following TotalEnergies’ $928 million in investments in affordable, reliable and secure U.S. energy projects, the United States will terminate the following leases and reimburse the company

[1] https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-and-totalenergies...

The feds have dropped their attempts to stop those from ongoing construction for now, but only one of those projects is complete.

CVOW is supposed to flow first power this month, but won't be done for ~a year, Empire Wind is also end of '26/early '27, Sunrise later in 2027.

Vineyard was completed this month, and Revolution is delivering power and targets completion over the next few months.

Per the piece, they only began to step away from Delve once they realized they couldn't close the deals they wanted and their hand was forced by outside asks.

And then also it took a rather large data leak later on to provide extra ammunition to decide and go forward with publishing this.

I'm glad they did, but there are a bunch of steps in between pure balls/altruism and what actually happened based on the blog.

Delve seems clearly scummy, but dear god the author's company was also engaging in fraud with their own customers and just hoping to skate by.

"The trouble starts when you look at the answers Delve’s AI provided. Based on what your Delve policies claim, the questionnaire AI answers questions stating you have an MDM, had a 200 hour pen-test performed, and do regular backup restoration simulations. Tens of questions are answered like that. Great, you just lied to your vendor but at least you have a good shot at landing the deal. So what did we do? We kept our mouths shut."

Pretty rotten stuff. I went from energy into the software startup world and as I've gotten further down that road and energy has become more and more of a hot field I've encountered a depressing increase in that "just do it to make a deal" ethos, but in critical infrastructure.

Like, no, former Apple PM who learned about an interconnection queue from ChatGPT last week, you are not going to fix the grid, and even moreso you can't "just do X and ask forgiveness later", not in electricity.

I will have to let my wife and many folks she worked with who were illegally terminated, then brought back into uncertain limbo and so on throughout the year that someone on the internet is certain that none of this happened and 2025 was just a bad dream. Their projects and programs still exist and have been progressing well the same as they were 18 months ago.

LinkedIn is also a great example of this stuff at the moment. Every day I see posts where someone clearly took a slide or a diagram from somewhere, then had ChatGPT "make it better" and write text for them to post along with it. Words get mangled, charts no longer make sense, but these people clearly aren't reading anything they're posting.

It's not like LinkedIn was great before, but the business-influencer incentives there seem to have really juiced nonsense content that all feels gratingly similar. Probably doesn't help that I work in energy which in this moment has attracted a tremendous number of hangers-on looking for a hit from the data center money funnel.

> As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes.

I have an appreciation for very bright lamps, and the project is neat, but that stuck out to me.

I'm always fascinated by people who both feel comfortable ignoring maybe the single most impactful society-determining apparatus but will also say "no one could have seen that coming", where that is whatever they were unaware of because they chose to check out. I find the stance so fascinating because for myself, it would be impossible to not try and understand why the world is the way it is.

Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not, and choosing to ignore it is, in fact, a political choice.

That's not what that image means at all. If you look closely, you'll even see 3 additional colors, plus white, from the 4 I'm guessing you identified.

Those are ERCOT load zones, a distinct concept and all within the ERCOT interconnection (grid).

On the markets side, Texas is made up of ERCOT, and then has portions in (descending order) MISO, SPP, and the non-market West.

In terms of "grids" Texas is mostly ERCOT, and then the Eastern Interconnection with a small smidge of Western Interconnection in the far west in El Paso Electric's territory.

That's cool to see, obiously Fermi has had them as someone else mentioned.

I grew up in Kane County, in the 90s it was the edge of the suburban-rural interface of Chicagoland (used to be the last commuter rail stop from the city).

Random fun tidbit is the WW1 code-breaking[0] that took place there as well, which today remains an acoustics lab[1].

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20220521185943/https://northwest...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverbank_Laboratories

Yup, was just dead for me and stayed dead, so I went and grabbed an archived link.

Don’t recall precisely how it was dead, but I assumed via traffic.

Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20251230214339/https://vptdigita...

Despite the massive PPAs that have already been signed on a chunk of the plant’s planned output I also find it very hard to believe.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems called dibs on next last year by saying they’re gonna have a Dominion (Virginia) commercial site up and running in the early 2030s.

https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-system...

Second US organized market to do so, and third in the region, after NY(ISO) and Ontario (IESO).

With HQ there as well, it’s actually quite a large coal-free chunk of grid.

What will be interesting is the extent to which offshore wind and imports from HQ will be able to materialize according to plan. OSW is having a hatchet being taken to it in the US currently, and imports from HQ into NY and NE have been way down recently while big new lines are also built.

Not exactly in the ISO forecasts, but very much supported by state policy has been the rapid expansion of behind the meter solar in New England. Really taken the edge off of summer days in particular, although also susceptible to smoke from Canadian wildfires.

Not the most exciting markets day-to-day, but interesting long-term things happening.

imo, that's basically the dirty secret of grid data, post 9/11 it seemed as if everything went behind the CEII wall, but in reality it has always been that if you're a legacy player or have the money you can make sure you have access to everything.

It's a thorny issue and something I ponder in my day-to-day[0]. We're members in ISOs where it makes sense, and can provide CEII data once we've confirmed customers already have access, but I would love to be able to show some of it publicly. It's also odd how things vary from market to market. Transmission outages: public everywhere, except ERCOT, where they're considered Secure. Generator bids: anonymized and delayed by up to 90 days everywhere, except ERCOT, where it's 60-days and not anonymized at all (yes, ERCOT is different wrt to FERC jurisdiction).

Years ago I worked at a market monitor[1], and we got everything, just cloning the changes to ISO databases overnight every day, second-by-second PI (plant information) data, it was awesome. The potential advantages from data asymmetry are big enough that there are multiple companies with physical sensors out in the world measuring power lines in different ways to try and reconstruct grid activity in real time, and then others doing it entirely from access to CEII and a deep understanding of how the grid function. But all of this is heavily oriented towards traders, not developers, although I would use trading tools when developing projects because they were the most advanced.

[0] https://www.gridstatus.io/live

[1] https://potomaceconomics.com/

They’ve steadily expanded over the years, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was real. It’s not just calculators, TI chips show up in a lot of military hardware in particular.

Also already building a new fab up in Sherman, Texas.

Fabs have pretty decent electricity demand, I actually sited a battery against that one after we did a bit of modeling with the new load vs the solar flows in the area. Siting just means make a land deal, figure out easements, and start working its way through the queue. Might not ever get built though, lot of money and hurdles in the way ha.

Every time I see an industrial announcement like this power is the first thing I think of - where it’s gonna come from and what impact it will have on the existing grid.

Bluesky has really exploded in certain niches over the past week, I think my followers have gone up 5-6x since Saturday.

I'd been a somewhat active user over the past year as conversation on the field I work in (energy) become so degraded on Twitter as to make it kind of worthless (mean in multiple senses of the word as well as ludicrous levels of spam), but Bluesky was pretty relaxed without a lot of traction, now there's some real heat to it as things pick up.

Hopefully this surge is real, has certianly gotten me to be much more active.