A Replacement-Level Holiday Season Blog Post
This will not be a “normal” edition of Coop’s Energy Transition Blog. Why? Well, I had one of those about 80% drafted and ready to go, and in the shuffle of rushing out the door to catch a flight to see family in the San Francisco Bay Area for Thanksgiving, I failed to pack my personal laptop for the trip. Then I was back home in New York again briefly before heading to India for a friend’s wedding. Also left the personal laptop at home during that time. And of course I keep all of my drafts exactly where they belong: In the Downloads folder on my desktop, no online backup. As an investment professional, I’m aware this does not speak well of my ability to assess and mitigate risk. Lesson learned? We’ll see.
Now, here I am in Heathrow Terminal 3 on the way home from Delhi, trying to drop something at least mildly interesting into your inbox before 2026. Have also been sprinting to close a project M&A deal by end of year, along with (it seems) just about everyone else in the industry. That means it’s time to lower the bar, shoot from the hip, and [insert another lazy cliché here – maybe “done is better than perfect?”]. What you should expect from this edition of Coop’s Energy Transition Blog is, in other words, a replacement-level performance. For those unfamiliar with the term, “replacement-level” in a sports context means the quality of production offered by a player whose skills would earn them the league’s lowest allowable salary.* You can think of it as a bare-minimum measure of adequacy.
So, what to share with you, my loyal readers, in a replacement-level blog? Here’s a brain dump on a few things that I’ve been thinking about lately.
*For example, imagine you are the general manager of a baseball team. Your star shortstop gets injured, and you need to promote a new player from the minor leagues immediately to replace him – not a future star, just some random guy you happen to have available, a warm body with a bare minimum of baseball skill such that you don’t mind paying him the lowest salary the players’ union will let you get away with until you can sign or trade for someone better. This idea of “replacement-level” is a better benchmark for a player’s ability than “average” because “average” players actually add a lot of value if they are available consistently. To massively oversimplify an example, you’d rather have an “average” player on your team who hits one home run for every two games played and plays in every game of the season than a “star” player who hits a home run in every game played but is injured and unable to play for three out of every five games, assuming his backup while injured is a “replacement-level” player from the minor leagues who only hits a home run once every twenty-five games.
Now, here I am in Heathrow Terminal 3 on the way home from Delhi, trying to drop something at least mildly interesting into your inbox before 2026. Have also been sprinting to close a project M&A deal by end of year, along with (it seems) just about everyone else in the industry. That means it’s time to lower the bar, shoot from the hip, and [insert another lazy cliché here – maybe “done is better than perfect?”]. What you should expect from this edition of Coop’s Energy Transition Blog is, in other words, a replacement-level performance. For those unfamiliar with the term, “replacement-level” in a sports context means the quality of production offered by a player whose skills would earn them the league’s lowest allowable salary.* You can think of it as a bare-minimum measure of adequacy.
So, what to share with you, my loyal readers, in a replacement-level blog? Here’s a brain dump on a few things that I’ve been thinking about lately.
*For example, imagine you are the general manager of a baseball team. Your star shortstop gets injured, and you need to promote a new player from the minor leagues immediately to replace him – not a future star, just some random guy you happen to have available, a warm body with a bare minimum of baseball skill such that you don’t mind paying him the lowest salary the players’ union will let you get away with until you can sign or trade for someone better. This idea of “replacement-level” is a better benchmark for a player’s ability than “average” because “average” players actually add a lot of value if they are available consistently. To massively oversimplify an example, you’d rather have an “average” player on your team who hits one home run for every two games played and plays in every game of the season than a “star” player who hits a home run in every game played but is injured and unable to play for three out of every five games, assuming his backup while injured is a “replacement-level” player from the minor leagues who only hits a home run once every twenty-five games.
Cash Is King; Europe Is Spooked; “Platform Value” is a Myth…
Those are my three takeaways from a concise and content-dense LinkedIn post shared by Prashant Khorana earlier this month. As of this writing, the post itself appears to have been deleted, but I encourage you to check out his other LinkedIn posts and his Substack for valuable insight on renewables transactions and market trends. Mr. Khorana leads power and renewables deal advisory at industry stalwart WoodMac, and in that deleted LinkedIn post he shared (in the context of rumors that EDF is eyeing a full sale of its US renewables business) a few recent US renewable platform valuation comps. He pointed out that the recent Duke, Repsol, and EDPR sales to private equity buyers landed between $800 and $1,800 in enterprise value per kilowatt of operational projects, with variations driven by portfolio composition and marginal value of O&M orgs and development pipelines within each platform, and guided to an approx. $5-6B target EV for EDF’s potential US exit based on these comps. His post read, in part:
EDF joins a growing list of European developers trimming or exiting their US exposure after impairments, offshore volatility, higher capital costs, and political whiplash. Meanwhile, private capital continues to accumulate scale at disciplined, yield-driven valuations… The US renewables market is finally re-pricing around contracted cash yield, not platform mythology.
Khorana says he believes this is healthy for the industry, and I agree. You can make “easy money” on a large capital base in renewables, meaning build or purchase assets throwing off stable, contracted long-term cash flows (the IPP/YieldCo model), or you can chase quick returns by greenfielding and selling pre-NTP (the develop-and-flip model). But trying to do both without a very smart and disciplined approach to deploying capital into project development and equipment procurement activities usually results in disappointment in the long run, and the long run has now arrived as the irrational optimism of 2021-2023 has faded. IPPs are no longer being valued at a platform level based on absurdly high implied project success rates (i.e. low attrition) attributed to their development portfolios, because serious market participants have now accepted two truths:
- Even good projects can die at any time before (or even after) shovels go in the ground.
- Bad projects with fatal flaws need to be killed as quickly as possible, not kept alive in the hope that they will magically become good projects later on if more money is spent on them.
No matter how high your PPA price or low your interconnection upgrade costs, those positive attributes can’t save a project that can’t buy insurance because it’s in a flood zone or won’t get a special use permit because of an anti-renewables county administrator. Renewables development is really, really hard, even if you do everything right, and valuations of development pipelines these days are finally reflecting this.
So, back to EDF: If the sale of the firm’s US assets does fetch, say, $8-10 billion (EV) rather than Khorana’s ballpark figure of $5-6 billion, why would that be? Likely not because a buyer attributes outsized value to EDF’s development portfolio that might start construction 2-4 years from now (see above). Rather, someone might pony up in excess of the valuation implied by recent comps for operating assets if they think that:
So, back to EDF: If the sale of the firm’s US assets does fetch, say, $8-10 billion (EV) rather than Khorana’s ballpark figure of $5-6 billion, why would that be? Likely not because a buyer attributes outsized value to EDF’s development portfolio that might start construction 2-4 years from now (see above). Rather, someone might pony up in excess of the valuation implied by recent comps for operating assets if they think that:
- They can re-contract some projects at higher rates given increasing electricity demand from the AI big boys (or from broad-based C&I load growth if you’re skeptical about the AI electricity demand story);
- They can pay termination fees to end or downsize current PPAs and increase the portfolio’s merchant exposure to take advantage of expected higher wholesale (i.e. spot) power prices in the next several years, driven by the same factors as #1;
- They can reduce opex and improve margins by optimizing operations, which could include stuff like renegotiating O&M contracts, implementing new asset management software, or “cost synergies” (which is when you think you’ll be able to fire people in e.g. the targetco’s accounting department because you already have your own accounting department); or
- They can engage in financial engineering (getting more and/or cheaper debt than the portfolio currently holds, classic private equity LBO stuff) to juice equity returns.
This list doesn’t include “revenue synergies” because:
- These are pretty much a myth, used to juice pro forma post-acquisition cash flows and justify overpaying/overborrowing to get a deal done.
- To the extent they ever exist, revenue synergies are more applicable to consumer-facing widget-makers than to real assets businesses like renewable energy.
The four items I listed above are all pretty fundamental-driven, based on different views of how the portfolio’s cash flows could respond to future market conditions and operational or financing decisions. There’s still risk here, but the downside case for buyers of operating renewables assets, assuming these mostly have long-term offtake contracts in place, is more like “we overestimated the 2040-2045 merchant pricing tail by 8% and achieved a 9.8% IRR rather than the 11.5% that we underwrote” than “we bought worthless assets and are going to take a 60% writedown on the value of the portfolio.”
All this to say that while nobody is really betting on upside anymore in the form of throwing money at platforms with early- to mid-stage development pipelines, plenty of seasoned infra investors should still be interested in parking their money in EDF US’s operating asset portfolio to achieve stable, contracted cash flows. EDF’s own outlook on the sale could range from disappointment to relief to excitement to thrilled disbelief depending on whether the winning bid comes in at an enterprise value of, say, 8, 10, 12, or 15x adjusted EBITDA on the portfolio level (and what those adjustments are). I don’t see this divestment as a fire sale per se, but I do view EDF’s desire to sell now, in a buyer’s market, as an indication that they view US renewables exposure as a risk no longer worth taking, whether that view is driven by the current policy environment or by operational underperformance within their portfolio of assets.
All this to say that while nobody is really betting on upside anymore in the form of throwing money at platforms with early- to mid-stage development pipelines, plenty of seasoned infra investors should still be interested in parking their money in EDF US’s operating asset portfolio to achieve stable, contracted cash flows. EDF’s own outlook on the sale could range from disappointment to relief to excitement to thrilled disbelief depending on whether the winning bid comes in at an enterprise value of, say, 8, 10, 12, or 15x adjusted EBITDA on the portfolio level (and what those adjustments are). I don’t see this divestment as a fire sale per se, but I do view EDF’s desire to sell now, in a buyer’s market, as an indication that they view US renewables exposure as a risk no longer worth taking, whether that view is driven by the current policy environment or by operational underperformance within their portfolio of assets.
…Unless You Are a Data Center Platform?
Holding aside the industry-wide chaos brought about by the passage of the GOP budget bill, the two hottest areas of firm-specific gossip in the US renewables rumor mill this year have been 1) the Pine Gate bankruptcy and 2) the Intersect IPO. Smarter and more plugged-in folks than I are writing good explainers on the Pine Gate situation, so click through to those links if you’re interested in that.
Regarding that Intersect IPO: Turns out there’s not going to be one. Rather than going public, Intersect is selling itself to Google (with the exception of its Texas operating assets and its California operating and development assets, which seem to be staying with the firm’s previous equity investors, TPG and Climate Adaptive Infrastructure). The price: $4.75 billion, plus assumption of the company’s debt. What’s Google actually getting for their money? The press release cites “Intersect’s world-class team and multiple gigawatts of energy and data center projects in development, or under construction, from its successful existing partnership with Google.” Two things that stick out to me here:
Regarding that Intersect IPO: Turns out there’s not going to be one. Rather than going public, Intersect is selling itself to Google (with the exception of its Texas operating assets and its California operating and development assets, which seem to be staying with the firm’s previous equity investors, TPG and Climate Adaptive Infrastructure). The price: $4.75 billion, plus assumption of the company’s debt. What’s Google actually getting for their money? The press release cites “Intersect’s world-class team and multiple gigawatts of energy and data center projects in development, or under construction, from its successful existing partnership with Google.” Two things that stick out to me here:
- They mention the team before the projects. Is it reading into things too much to say that this sentence structure makes the deal sound like an acqui-hire? That’s one of the oldest tools in Big Tech’s playbook to quickly get talented teams on board even if the company they’re buying hasn’t figured out how to make money yet.
- They're not buying any operational projects. So there’s still wood to chop in the development and construction processes before the stuff that Google is getting becomes de-risked, cash-flowing, load-and-compute-serving assets.
In my view, this deal happened because Intersect first got lucky, then made a quick, smart pivot. Back in the heady days of the IRA, with generous subsidies for hydrogen production, the firm sourced a bunch of project development sites that could be used to generate electricity for hydrogen electrolysis, rather than selling that electricity to the grid. This meant they could focus on identifying and developing sites that had high solar production potential and good physical buildability, without worrying about the slow, expensive interconnection queue process that so often stalls or kills projects, and make money by selling the clean hydrogen they made from these off-grid generation resources.
The repeal of the IRA hydrogen subsidies by OBBB destroyed the viability of hydrogen projects, but by that point Intersect had already pivoted to marketing themselves as a provider of power to data centers: Same development sites, different end use. In fact, earlier this year, they rebranded from “Intersect Power” to just “Intersect” and began to publicly position themselves as a developer of data centers – not just a provider of power to data centers.* When the Google deal was announced this week, the Times wrote it up like this: Google Buys Data Center Company for $4.75 Billion. Not “renewables company,” “independent power producer,” or even “data center energy supplier,” but “data center company.” Rebrand complete.
*They also changed their logo, which I think was a mistake – the old one was super cool and instantly identifiable – but YMMV;IANAGD: Your mileage may vary; I am not a graphic designer.
To be clear: As far as I can tell, Intersect has yet to actually develop a data center all the way through to COD. Still, Google is still willing to pay almost $5 billion for a business that has recently and rapidly shifted its market positioning from energy developer to integrated energy and data center solutions provider, even as it’s unclear whether Intersect has the full set of capabilities required to execute on this new direction. With this in mind, how should we view the Google-Intersect deal in the context of the prior item regarding the EDF US portfolio selldown and other recent renewables platform sale comps? For me, it comes down to this:
The repeal of the IRA hydrogen subsidies by OBBB destroyed the viability of hydrogen projects, but by that point Intersect had already pivoted to marketing themselves as a provider of power to data centers: Same development sites, different end use. In fact, earlier this year, they rebranded from “Intersect Power” to just “Intersect” and began to publicly position themselves as a developer of data centers – not just a provider of power to data centers.* When the Google deal was announced this week, the Times wrote it up like this: Google Buys Data Center Company for $4.75 Billion. Not “renewables company,” “independent power producer,” or even “data center energy supplier,” but “data center company.” Rebrand complete.
*They also changed their logo, which I think was a mistake – the old one was super cool and instantly identifiable – but YMMV;IANAGD: Your mileage may vary; I am not a graphic designer.
To be clear: As far as I can tell, Intersect has yet to actually develop a data center all the way through to COD. Still, Google is still willing to pay almost $5 billion for a business that has recently and rapidly shifted its market positioning from energy developer to integrated energy and data center solutions provider, even as it’s unclear whether Intersect has the full set of capabilities required to execute on this new direction. With this in mind, how should we view the Google-Intersect deal in the context of the prior item regarding the EDF US portfolio selldown and other recent renewables platform sale comps? For me, it comes down to this:
- Renewable platforms used to be hot, aren’t hot anymore, and are now being appropriately valued as part of the infrastructure asset class based largely on actual cash flows from operating assets. From 2021 through 2024, renewable energy was a hot sector in which trend-chasing firms and investors wanted to pursue platform-building efforts, often without a good idea of how renewables platforms would actually make money and hit return hurdles. Now it’s become clear that renewables can be a good way to make money, but there’s nothing special about renewable project economics that justify high valuations on pre-construction development pipelines or give solar, wind, or battery storage meaningfully higher returns or lower risks than other large, capital-intensive infrastructure assets like thermal power plants, waste and water treatment facilities, toll roads, airports, etc.
- Data center platforms are currently hot, and (as with renewables a few years ago) development-stage assets form a substantial share of platform valuations, with much more growth priced in than is typical for stabilized infrastructure asset businesses. We don’t yet know whether data center developers will run into the same issues with underestimating project attrition rates that renewables developers have, as assets move from site control to development to construction to operation. We also don’t know how profitable these data centers will be over their lifespan; hyperscale data center leasing revenues per square foot or per server rack are massive right now, but they will not remain elevated forever as developers rush to bring new data centers online, competing away excess returns with each marginal asset added to the total supply.
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Intersect saw an opportunity to get valued more highly for their potential as a data center platform than for their track record as a renewables platform, so they took it. Everybody else in the renewables industry right now is trying to accomplish the same thing, but Intersect had the baked-in advantage of those hydrogen sites, which they were able to re-market as data center co-location opportunities as the market shifted. Other players are still trying to figure out how to credibly make the case that they are deserving of tech-company (or at least data center developer) valuation multiples, rather than as the fairly boring, capital-intensive energy generation businesses they truly are. If folks are able to raise money by taking this approach, great, but at some point the ambition needs to be supported by reality on the ground. The eventual winners in this convergence between the development of energy and data center projects will be the firms that:
- Understand what the hyperscalers actually want in terms of both energy and compute performance/operating profile, delivery timelines, and costs, and build out their offerings from the energy side accordingly.
- Sell the narrative that their expertise in renewable project development translates into a differentiated ability to serve and/or develop data centers.
- Think critically about where they actually add value (should they get involved in actual data center development, or just develop projects that sell energy to other parties’ data centers?).
- Execute quickly to get points on the board and prove themselves as trusted partners to big players in the data center ecosystem – meaning bringing real projects to COD, not just making more framework partnership agreement announcements that are long on big dollar figures and short on details.
Last thing on this topic: A bit of idle speculation on why Intersect preferred to sell to Google than IPO. To fetch a desirable valuation for an IPO, Intersect would ideally have been able to show, in descending order of attractiveness to investors:
- Positive last twelve months free cash flow.
- Positive LTM EBITDA.
- Positive next twelve months FCF.
- Positive NTM EBITDA.
- Positive 2027 expected FCF.
- Positive 2027E EBITDA.
- …and so on. You get the idea.
However, with their pivot to a data center-focused strategy underway, it’s unlikely that Intersect would have expected to achieve profitability as soon as the public markets would have demanded. Even if could have reasonably shown near- or medium-term profitability in their S-1, their bankers may have told them to expect an IPO price reflecting enterprise value of 12-14x forward-looking EBITDA, which seems about where the market is from recent comps. That’s not the kind of thing that gets you jumping up and down if you’re an investor who backed Intersect in previous rounds with the expectation of 3x-ing your money at exit.
By contrast, selling to Google allows Intersect to continue scaling without worrying as much about near-term profitability. Google has a massive balance sheet, very little debt relative to cash on hand, and an imperative to win in web-based AI offerings as LLM chatbots erode their traditional search product’s market share and ad pricing power. This means Google can afford to splash cash on a not-yet-profitable acquisition target that aligns with their broader corporate strategy. To grow its AI compute capacity fast enough, and to better control the costs of acquiring and powering this compute, Google would rather pay up for an in-house power and data center development unit than continue to depend on other players in the value chain for these outcomes, so this move is about the value they place upon being able to solve these problems internally rather than the intent to acquire a new revenue-generating business unit.
Of course, the Intersect and Google teams will still be making tough capital deployment decisions around energy and data center project development, but Intersect (although it will apparently continue to operate independently of Google for now) won’t be under pressure to achieve profitability as a standalone entity by selling power to many different customers at high prices – rather, it will now aim to serve Google’s energy and compute demands at a lower cost than Google would otherwise pay for these services. This is a key shift in mentality: Intersect will now have a guaranteed buyer in the form of Google and can therefore focus on developing and executing on high-quality project opportunities to serve Google’s needs without having to go out to the broader offtake markets to commercialize their projects. Good for them! We’ll see if Google gets its money’s worth.
By contrast, selling to Google allows Intersect to continue scaling without worrying as much about near-term profitability. Google has a massive balance sheet, very little debt relative to cash on hand, and an imperative to win in web-based AI offerings as LLM chatbots erode their traditional search product’s market share and ad pricing power. This means Google can afford to splash cash on a not-yet-profitable acquisition target that aligns with their broader corporate strategy. To grow its AI compute capacity fast enough, and to better control the costs of acquiring and powering this compute, Google would rather pay up for an in-house power and data center development unit than continue to depend on other players in the value chain for these outcomes, so this move is about the value they place upon being able to solve these problems internally rather than the intent to acquire a new revenue-generating business unit.
Of course, the Intersect and Google teams will still be making tough capital deployment decisions around energy and data center project development, but Intersect (although it will apparently continue to operate independently of Google for now) won’t be under pressure to achieve profitability as a standalone entity by selling power to many different customers at high prices – rather, it will now aim to serve Google’s energy and compute demands at a lower cost than Google would otherwise pay for these services. This is a key shift in mentality: Intersect will now have a guaranteed buyer in the form of Google and can therefore focus on developing and executing on high-quality project opportunities to serve Google’s needs without having to go out to the broader offtake markets to commercialize their projects. Good for them! We’ll see if Google gets its money’s worth.
Data Center Flexibility, Revisited
I recently wrote the following in Part Two of my blog challenging data center electricity demand growth forecasts:
[Energy efficiency expert Dr. Amory] Lovins is asking, “What if we didn’t accept that utilization rate [of data centers] would be fairly constant?” The examples he provides of training and batch inference are indeed areas in which compute can theoretically be re-allocated to times at which excess existing grid supply is sufficient to meet the facility’s electricity needs. It’s a good idea in principle. However, given that AI companies are rushing to lock in unthrottled 24/7 compute to meet future inference demand, it’s not clear that the social benefit from shifting compute activity to use cheaper, cleaner energy from existing assets actually translates to private benefit for the data center offtaker.
Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are sparing no expense to train and deploy their models as quickly as possible to stay ahead of the competition; they would rather have compute available on demand even if they pay more to power it. If and when the AI industry pivots to focus on profitability, with a mandate to reduce costs per model trained and per inference query served, time-shifting data center demand may help limit the amount of new-build generation required to serve AI electricity loads. Until then, I’m less optimistic about [data center demand flexibility] than Lovins is.
In that blog, I also called out the good work that Camus Energy is doing to help utilities and project developers build a cleaner, more resilient, and more flexible grid. Now they’re adding data center flexibility to their repertoire of offerings, and have published an interesting white paper on the topic in collaboration with energy planning software firm Encoord; Princeton University’s ZERO Lab; and Google (yep, those guys again). So, maybe I was too pessimistic about demand flexibility for data centers? Let’s see how the Camus crew is thinking about these issues.
The big headline from the report is that by combining flexible connection and bring-your-own capacity (BYOC), data centers can come online years earlier than would be possible following the standard utility large load interconnection process. Here’s a helpful explainer graphic from the report:
The big headline from the report is that by combining flexible connection and bring-your-own capacity (BYOC), data centers can come online years earlier than would be possible following the standard utility large load interconnection process. Here’s a helpful explainer graphic from the report:
The findings from the report’s modeling of the combined flex-connect/BYOC approach sound promising. Across the six modeled PJM data center sites, “Grid power remained available for more than 99% of all hours in the year, with on-site or co-located resources dispatched for only 40 to 70 hours annually to stay within transmission or generation limits. In total, this combined approach enables utilities to connect up to 3x as much data center capacity within two years as they could in 5-7 years under conventional methods, while maintaining system reliability.”
I’m not smart enough to fully understand the details of their modeling methodology, although I expect it’s some form of security-constrained economic dispatch (SCED) on the generation side along with a capacity pricing auction simulation driven by expected PJM capacity builds and retirements over the next decade or so – at least, that’s how we did it at ICF when I worked in energy consulting for a few years right after college. One methodological detail that did jump out to me, though, was an assumptions slide in Appendix B titled “Flexible Demand Modeling.”
I would have loved to get the details behind the decision to use these 20/40/60% demand flexibility assumptions. 20% is assumed as the base case, but why? Is it common knowledge among data center operators that curtailing a facility’s utilization by 20% is relatively easy and painless? Are there new technologies available that allow data center operators to shift compute execution across a geographically diverse set of data centers in real time to enable 20% or greater curtailment of certain flex-connected facilities when required, while making up the difference by increasing utilization of data centers elsewhere that are not being curtailed at that time? And why use 40% and 60% demand flexibility as the more aggressive cases, rather than, say, 25% and 30%?
What I’m getting at is a desire to better understand the operational implications of data center utilization curtailment, both at the individual facility and portfolio levels. Others more familiar with data center operational patterns and procedures may already get this intuitively, but it's a new topic for me, so I want to understand the intellectual underpinning behind these assumptions.
Another comment: Even if each data center that implements the flex-connect/BYOC approach only experiences 40 or 50 hours of curtailment per year, it seems important to understand whether a) that curtailment occurs within the same 40 hours for all sites in the portfolio (indicating a systematic risk of inadequate compute availability at certain times when everything is being curtailed due to grid supply limitations) or b) there is low overlap between curtailment hours for each individual data center site (such that full compute needs can be met at all times as simultaneous curtailment across multiple sites is rare). Data center flexibility looks much more attractive and achievable without compromising compute capacity uptime if the operational reality reflects b) rather than a). Disclaimer: I need to sit down with the report in greater depth to see if they’ve addressed these issues and I just missed this on my first reading.
What I’m getting at is a desire to better understand the operational implications of data center utilization curtailment, both at the individual facility and portfolio levels. Others more familiar with data center operational patterns and procedures may already get this intuitively, but it's a new topic for me, so I want to understand the intellectual underpinning behind these assumptions.
Another comment: Even if each data center that implements the flex-connect/BYOC approach only experiences 40 or 50 hours of curtailment per year, it seems important to understand whether a) that curtailment occurs within the same 40 hours for all sites in the portfolio (indicating a systematic risk of inadequate compute availability at certain times when everything is being curtailed due to grid supply limitations) or b) there is low overlap between curtailment hours for each individual data center site (such that full compute needs can be met at all times as simultaneous curtailment across multiple sites is rare). Data center flexibility looks much more attractive and achievable without compromising compute capacity uptime if the operational reality reflects b) rather than a). Disclaimer: I need to sit down with the report in greater depth to see if they’ve addressed these issues and I just missed this on my first reading.
A Brief Holiday Thank You 🎄🍾🙏
I started publishing my blog back in June because I had too many thoughts about the renewable energy industry bouncing around my head and nowhere to put them. At a bare minimum, writing helps me crystallize my thinking and have something to refer back to as my understanding of the world changes and my knowledge base grows over time. It’s even better when that growth is accelerated by conversations sparked by something I’ve written about – whether in person, on the phone, or via a written message.
With this in mind, I’m very grateful to you, the reader, for taking your scarce time and energy to absorb and respond to my writing. I look forward to continuing to share my thoughts here in 2026, and I’m excited to keep our dialogue going, whether you’re a close friend whom I bugged to subscribe back in June or you’re just happening upon the blog for the first time (in which case, please read my old posts; they’re better than this one). As a reminder, you can scroll down to the bottom of this page and enter your email to subscribe. This will send my future posts to your inbox a few days before I share them with the world on LinkedIn.
Have a wonderful holiday season, enjoy some sweet treats, stay hydrated, and I’ll see you next year!
Energetically,
Coop
With this in mind, I’m very grateful to you, the reader, for taking your scarce time and energy to absorb and respond to my writing. I look forward to continuing to share my thoughts here in 2026, and I’m excited to keep our dialogue going, whether you’re a close friend whom I bugged to subscribe back in June or you’re just happening upon the blog for the first time (in which case, please read my old posts; they’re better than this one). As a reminder, you can scroll down to the bottom of this page and enter your email to subscribe. This will send my future posts to your inbox a few days before I share them with the world on LinkedIn.
Have a wonderful holiday season, enjoy some sweet treats, stay hydrated, and I’ll see you next year!
Energetically,
Coop
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- This blog is written in my personal capacity and reflects only my own thinking, research, experience, and opinions.
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- Want to weigh in with your thoughts? Propose a correction or improvement? Find me on LinkedIn or shoot me an email: cwetherbee at alumni dot gsb dot stanford dot edu.