Alex Simakov
@Alexei_Simakov
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Energy Abundance & Climate Transition • Big Batteries🔋☢️ 🥑• Amateur Outdoorsman • First Gen 🇨🇦
Toronto, Ontario
Joined March 2016
Nice summary piece of all the moving parts. Data centers face a critical choice: agree to curtailment (powering down or switching to backup during peak demand) to connect 3-5 years faster, or wait in the queue. PJM hit stalemate on mandatory curtailment after pushback from
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Wrong framing here from a16z. Energy is not the capital constraint as it’s typically <5-10% of the fully loaded cost. It IS the bottleneck - it takes years to get equipment ordered, projects built, and longer for grid interconnect. This is why even folks are paying premium
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“To get a sense of how little electricity people use in sub-Saharan Africa, imagine each person there turning on a 50-watt light bulb. That alone would instantly double consumption. Nigeria, with 240m people, generates less electricity than Wyoming, with 0.6m” —@TheEconomist
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Joel makes a great point about geothermal that you see all the time in resource development: when technology improves, turns out there’s a lot more of something than we thought. An analogy from O&G. The USGS increased their estimate of gas in the Marcellus 50-fold over 20 years.
the most commonly cited total resource estimates of conventional geothermal are ~30-40 GWe in the contiguous USA (eg USGS, 2008), which is an order of magnitude+ too low for two simple reasons, (1) there's multiples more undiscovered sites out there, and (2) each site can
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And just like that, 58ktpa of long term #lithium supply vanishes. This mine was supposed to come online (after multiple delays) in 2028 and ramp up through 2030. For reference, 58ktpa = another $CATL Jianxiawo. One by one the high-capex projects will crumble right as lithium
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China's electricity is now 30% more than Europe's — PER CAPITA. More than double in total.
China's electricity per capita is up 569% Ours is down 7% Yeah we've had some energy efficiency gains and that's great, but we need more electricity. We should be building industrial capacity and electrifying our economy.
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The domination of energy storage in the fund raising scene right now. Only a snapshot for October 2025 but a telling one. ESS is raising 10x that of the upstream - battery minerals mining. @benchmarkmin
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Texas is moving so fast, EIA can't keep up. According to S&P, at the end of Q2, ERCOT had 14,000 megawatts of batteries. According to ERCOT, we're now at 15,712 megawatts. Texas has added more batteries in the last quarter than PJM has added in its entire history.
Battery capacity by power grid in the US: CAISO (California): 14,609 MW ERCOT (Texas): 10,982 MW PJM (Mid-Atlantic): 441 MW Crazy that California has built 33x more battery capacity than the largest grid in the US (PJM).
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Early evidence of lower prices for existing users from interconnection of new large loads from Entergy in Mississippi. Customer rates 16% lower than they would have been without new large loads. Investments from Google, Amazon, Meta helped finance broader grid upgrades along
WaPo has good article on electricity costs. More demand amortizes fixed costs of transmission & distribution over more users and ↓ prices. But cost of new gen is higher than depreciated cost of existing system, which ↑ prices. If new large loads pay actual cost of new gen (and
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AI data centers aren't driving bills higher. In many places, rising demand is lowering costs as fixed costs are spread out to more users. 1/2
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Until recently, datacenters were able to simply repurpose the carcass left over from America's deindustrialization. Honestly a compelling ode to capitalism.
.@romeovdean and I wrote a blog post to teach ourselves about the AI buildout. We were surprised by some of the things we learned: 1. There’s a huge fab CapEx overhang - with a single year of earnings in 2025, Nvidia could cover the last 3 years of TSMC’s ENTIRE CapEx. In 2025,
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"There’s growing recognition that our grid is severely underutilized and by increasing utilization (squeezing more out of the system through batteries, DR, etc) we can both meet the increasing demand for electricity and save Americans billions of dollars." 🎯
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Drew just released a white paper detailing what his company Heron Power is working on. In short, the goal is to drastically reduce the number of components required between the substation and data center racking. That also, in turn, dramatically increases the efficiency from
AI compute is scaling faster than the grid infrastructure supporting it. At @heronpower, we’re rethinking data center power from first principles — leveraging DC architectures inspired by energy storage and renewables to enable gigascale AI. Today I'm excited to share Heron's
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The @LBNL & @TheBrattleGroup teams have an excellent study out this week on what's feeding electricity price changes over the past 5 years. Legislators should be required to read or get a briefing on it before taking any vote on electricity policy! Highlights & my commentary🧵
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Batteries will soon provide power throughout the entire night. Then, they will power the entire night — everywhere.
It's astonishing how wide the battery curve has gotten in California. Last Tuesday, batteries consistently supplied more than 20% of demand for 4 hours from 6pm to 10pm. Price signals are working well.
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A key point I always try to convey to policymakers and business folks in the west is that China's competitiveness in manufacturing is underpinned by unrivaled scale and ecosystem. The stereotype far too often is that it's all about subsidies and cheap labor, which...
A group of Western VCs goes to China, not to invest but to see what the competition is like. They realize that China is too far ahead on clean tech and decide the only way forward is to work with Chinese companies. One VC describing a visit to Chinese battery giant CATL:
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Match after match, point after point, Félix Auger-Aliassime gave everything in New York 💙 His journey to the US Open semi-finals was more than tennis. It was passion, resilience and a story that made Canada proud 🇨🇦
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Most people are still sleeping on the battery revolution. Batteries are already providing massive benefits to the grid, especially in markets with rational prices/incentives. This piece from @bswud & @Vernon3Austin is by far the best thing I've seen explaining what's going on.
NEW at Works in Progress – @Vernon3Austin and @bswud on the beauty of batteries, which massively reduce how much redundant energy generation & grid we have to build. But what's holding them back is the lack of a price system in electricity markets. https://t.co/MoWDSIcTWN
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NEW: The first evidence of a solar take-off in Africa☀️✈️ x33 rise in Algeria🇩🇿 solar panel imports in the 12 mths to June 2025, compared to previous 12 mths. x8 in Zambia🇿🇲 x7 in Botswana🇧🇼 x6 in Sudan🇸🇩 x3 in each of Liberia🇱🇷, DRC🇨🇩, Benin🇧🇯, Angola🇦🇴, Ethiopia🇪🇹 🧵
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