The best book I have read on maternity leave so far is Adrian Tchaikovsky's 'Service Model'. It's funny at first, and then cold fingers start to play down your spine. The AI does not hate you. The AI just has pre-set priorities completely inappropriate to the situation. Which is lethal.

Seeds that have been buried in mud for a thousand years can still grow?!

"The line between optimism and delusion is fine one"😂... we should have used that as a subtitle for our latest report;)... bsky.app/profile/clea...

It's important to celebrate even quite small reasons for climate optimism, because otherwise you will succumb to despair, and that will help nobody. Sure, the line between optimism and delusion is a fine one, but you have to get out of bed in the morning and sometimes for that you need delusion.

I love the local public swimming pool, in Roggwil. Sadly as the days get cooler it is more and more like a private swimming pool, and it closes for the season on Saturday.

Solar panels now cost peanuts (under 10 cents per W) in most of the world. Carbon dioxide emissions in high-income countries are now falling, and there's reason to believe other countries will be able to develop much more sustainably than those did. ourworldindata.org/grapher/annu...

Child when we have a day completely free: Mama I'm BORED what shall I DOOO... Child when we have a fairly busy day planned and are scrambling to get ready: Mama can I go to the garden to collect sunflower seeds to save for the birds in winter?

lolol I WFH today but I did find some old pics so here it is in its rickety glory (yes, I used light-up bricks for the boiler)

India has a better chance of building a significant domestic solar supply chain than the US by 2035. Though it's a boom right now and will go through a bust.

To be fair, greentech deployment and climate action was never a race, it was a fitness program. Nobody has to win, everyone should want to improve. Perfectly valid to say "well done China! Can I get a quote for some solar panels and batteries?"

Thread is accurate and worth reading.

nice thing about walking roughly 4 miles to buy a bike is that it's erased any "should i REALLY buy a bike right now" cuz i'm not walking four miles back

1. Capex. Unless you are unlucky enough to be in the US you shouldn't be paying more than $2/W for PV (anyone want to benchmark battery capex?) 2. Are they bullshitting you about payback period by, eg, assuming power prices will rise dramatically? Bad sign.

This seems like progress, now to see what it means in practice. My village, Fulenbach, is an exporter of power on a sunny day - a difficult situation for the village (!!) utility.

I am currently quiet on clean energy because this household is in the trenches of having a new baby. So. Much. Pee. So much laundry. So much trying to tell if a grumpy noise means the strange little creature wants something, or something is wrong, or if he's just trying to fart.

I’d forgotten about this! One for the ages

This is progress. (Though some of it is driven by a slowdown in construction. And in the past, emissions from the power sector have been substantially determined by rainfall and therefore hydro generation over the summer in southern provinces).

Aussie chiming in: it's more of a pet name. It definitely gets used, but I don't think it's quite as ubiquitous as Maccas is for McDonalds. Probably hear AC/DC and Acca Dacca in equal amounts.

TIL: While most of the world pronounces AC/DC as “A-C-D-C”, in their native Australia, they go by “Acca Dacca”.

Can also recommend Inventing the Renaissance. It is, for starters, very funny. Just re-read Terra Ignota in hospital and I would only recommend it to some, but it is a very interesting bash (ha) at exploring a phenomenally complex world without gender, scarcity, or borders.

Been busy this week. My clean energy work is going to be essentially nonexistent for the rest of the year, though sure I will get bored and be back intermittently. Child 2 is reassuringly normal, I am much better for being home from hospital and having aircon.

This is excellent. Yes, it will still need to draw from the grid, especially in winter. But having planned and integrated EV charging and local batteries, operating in combination as demand flexibility to prevent power use spikes, is the way forward to integrate local renewables.

We use nearly 40M acres of cornfields to grow ethanol. Nearly 40M acres of solar farms (with some batteries) could easily power the country, even if we all drove EVs and used AI. www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/o...

When they tell you about Chinese demand problems: "Cutting the other way, BNEF’s early outlooks projected that China’s EV demand would remain policy-led until 2025. Instead, organic consumer demand took over around 2022." 🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳 #alwaysbecharging @colinmckerracher.bsky.social ✍️ for #bloombergnef

This by @sammyroth.bsky.social is a really good example of mainstream coverage of my sector - a generally positive tone but lots of interesting details about LA's power situation (eg the planned hydrogen co-firing plants). Also $39.64/MWh for 2019 solar + storage! www.latimes.com/environment/...

Just saying: we don't talk about this trend enough.

This is the US National Energy Laboratory (NREL)'s 1Q 2025 update on the US and global PV market, with some great data points. (California generated 32% of electricity from PV in 2024 though iirc some nuance in generation vs consumption due to imports). docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy25ost...

This feels like a silly false dichotomy. Of course we're building renewables to displace fossil fuel consumption. And it's working in many OECD economies, getting there in others! With cheap RE we finally have a great answer to "hur hur if we close the coal plants what does your computer run on".

Me calling the avian vet: please I need an appointment, my goose is sick Vet's receptionist: what are the symptoms? Me: she's quiet VR: ok but what are the symptoms Me: you don't understand, she is going to DIE

The good news is that the JAC NEV 60 electric truck has a PSC of 82. The bad news is that the majority of the potatoes are in the storage behind the seat. This reduces the amount of potatoes available to the driver at short notice which, in my opinion, is a noteworthy oversight.

Explaining once again how to make sense of China's power generation data: -National Bureau of Statistics reports power generation from "above-scale" firms by technology. This is quite comprehensive for thermal, hydro and nuclear, but substantially under-reports wind and is next to useless for solar.

This is very, very cheap - comparable with the basic price of the components. I hope people are putting them up carefully because a few of these falling on heads would be bad, and poorly mounted panels are more likely to break / underperform, but nice if you've got a good spot for them.

The headline like this which lives in my mind forever www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/s...

End of extended-family beach holiday in glamourous Bognor Regis. Underrated, tbh, especially with a swarm of small children (mine, and her cousins of various degrees). No more 7am sea swims. Now hoping Child 2 stays inside for the entire duration of the train ride back to Switzerland.

I don't work in this field, but on the theory that the more you know about the field/context, the better you'll be at getting a job and the better you'll do once you're there, a couple of resources: (1) @solarchase.bsky.social 's book, below. (Don't let the boring title fool you.)

I think I’d have been suspicious of this shipment. Whose US modules would get sold into New Zealand?

California solar curtailment down 12% on back of batteries #energysky -- via pv magazine usa: pv-magazine-usa.com/...

Not saying you should do this. But I have just been rushed (completely unnecessarily) through Eurostar security in about 5 minutes, presumably because I am very visibly pregnant, with a haste that was less courtesy and more "panic and get her out of here before she has a baby on us".

Yep. Normalize just getting renewables done as a job! Should have wide-eyed idealists who do not know how anything works but want to Do Good, finance folk who see everything as a series of revenue flows and barely know what they work in, incompetent activists and horrible fossil lobbyists.

THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO. Thanks @roycerk2.bsky.social and @solarchase.bsky.social for a great chat. news.wickedproblems.uk/p/cheap-sola...

Been working on this analysis of the US OBBBA this week. Core BNEF assumption is that the IRS follows the executive order to make the implementation of "FOEC" rules limiting Chinese content / subcomponents / intellectual property in new wind and solar projects almost impossible to meet.

I am 36 weeks pregnant and setting off from my home in Switzerland to BNEF Training Week in the UK shortly, and it's amazing how many people are surprised that yeah, you can just take the train and not fly. (I do hope this baby isn't born in Paris though).

I am enjoying this article via @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com 's Substack about a bird, or rather three birds, used as a plot point in the 2000 Charlie's Angel film and the solution to a 25-year-old mystery. slate.com/culture/2025...

This is fine, we should definitely put more than half our soy oil into biofuels, Brazil can always just tear down the Amazon to make more. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

This is bingo for stupid anti-renewables arguments. Apart from anything else, the Brontës would have happily written wind turbines into their landscapes if anything so good for producing power had existed back then, they'd fit the aesthetic just fine. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Yes, that would scare most people off. Did you see this from Gniewomir: www.linkedin.com/posts/gniewo...

Last time I had a baby (2018), I took 4 months off and the entire damn solar module making business transitioned from multi to mono tech. Maybe this time (August 2025) I'll come back in January and everyone will be installing perovskites. (I do not believe this).

I'm not nearly as much an expert on solar module tech as people think, but if you use a semiconductor layer in the glass rather than the cell itself, don't you need a separate set of busbars embedded in the glass to take the current from the second layer (4T design)?

I do not, and I would like to!