Recovering performance engineer / IRP analyst / wind turbine climber / pipeline planner. Sometimes fish and losing sports teams.

United States
Joined January 2015
I’m on a mission to civilize #EnergyTwitter one thread at a time.
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Drew Smithee, PE retweeted
3 Days Until Halloween 🎃
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Drew Smithee, PE retweeted
SCOOP: The Trump administration is approving 3 more wind projects (2 in Illinois and 1 in Iowa) stalled by the Pentagon in a bid to win Dem support for the bipartisan permitting reform bill. It’s the 2nd tranche of ongoing approvals. Text subscribers got it first!
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Drew Smithee, PE retweeted
Always read the fine print...
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I feel like I got a tour of these mines in the 90s, I also kind of feel like I’m gaslighting myself.
Morton salt is mined 2,000 feet below Lake Erie. And now the lake is leaking into the mine. The mine was evacuated, with no injuries. Do not expect the mine to reopen anytime soon. Or ever.
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Drew Smithee, PE retweeted
Scoop: The Trump administration is offering as much as $5 billion in financing to Constellation Energy to upgrade and modernize the nuclear operator’s fleet of reactors in Illinois, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.
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Above??? That shit is 10Hz too low. 😎
Frequency above the operational range this morning The second chart is the wind output. The blue shaded area to the left is wind on the transmission system The lighter shaded area to the left is wind that had to be curtailed off... It's absolutely massive and the reason we've already spent over £25 million balancing the grid today About a third of current wind generation is being thrown away This is what you get when you race to build windfarms behind grid constraints. This is our money being wasted by the Connect and Manage policy this government refuses to cancel (charts from Amira Technologies) @Miatsf @mgshanks @AndrewBowie_MP @ClaireCoutinho @harrietc @ColinMoynihanUK @drlukeevans @ashley7fox @TiceRichard @cmackinlay @DavidGHFrost @mattwridley @Iromg @AllisonPearson @MerrynSW @EdConwaySky @afneil @mattotele @jonathan_leake @julietsamuel @energygovuk
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Drew Smithee, PE retweeted
Key paragraph: "Oil industry leaders have urged the Trump administration against a wholesale repeal of methane mandates in favor of more modest recalibrations, arguing the Biden-era requirements at times were technologically infeasible, inefficient and costly." Industry associations mostly wanted targeted fixes, as reflected in their public comments.
SCOOP: President Trump is set to unveil a plan to dial back methane mandates on oil & gas operations during a Texas rally Tuesday. He's expected to cast the proposal as a way to encourage more domestic energy production & lower costs. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… w/ @Zhirji28
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Drew Smithee, PE retweeted
Anyone long vol in the eastern interconnect is going to get paid well over next 5 years.
Jefferies moving forecasts by GW over the course of weeks! "Satellite imaging data now points to ~27 GW of data centers by '27 (up from low-20s just weeks ago) and we see SPCX as single-handedly skewing estimates higher." GW seems like a tech spec vs massive infrastructure project but for example, going from 20-> 27GW: -+$350BN capex -+$560BN monetized inference opportunity (illustrative) -7 San Franciscos worth of power It's a crazy time cause sellside and buyside treat these inputs very flippantly when in reality they are MASSIVE What is clear, though, is the project-level trackers (e.g., SemiAnalysis, Aterio, etc.) increasingly seeing huge lines of sight. Few months ago I would've told you impossible to get ~30GW/yr but it seems like construction trends point to that being true (on a facility basis) for 2027 and 2028. Just because it's under construction and scheduled to come online mean it hits the target, but clear the ambitions and tracking of real construction progress continue to move up... *Not going to dive into the separate debate about what level of GW is needed, etc.
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Markey is just holding out for a cap and trade program
Scoop in @PunchbowlNews AM: 4 Senate Democrats led by @SenDuckworth are pushing back on the bipartisan permitting reform bill, arguing it will further enable Trump to favor fossil fuel projects and won’t stop its attacks on clean energy. Merkley, Markey, Wyden join new letter
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Drew Smithee, PE retweeted
Spooky Halloween Poll! 🎃🪦👻🐈‍⬛ What's been more horrific this October?
10%Ghosts and Goblins
90%#Natgas Price Moves
40 votes • Final results
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Is this the utility death spiral?
We have to move away from volumetric rates
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VP asks for 30 page technical document. VP doesn’t read document. VP sticks into co-pilot and forwards prompt and response. FML.
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Drew Smithee, PE retweeted
Offshore drilling rig in Gabon sinking as one of the supporting legs punched through the seabed. 110 of 115 people accounted for. $208 million gone.
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Drew Smithee, PE retweeted
Energy crisis? What crisis? US natural gas benchmark price falls to ~$2.5 per mBtu, approaching a fresh 2-year low.
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Long story, but there’s a Canadian in Vancouver that has a very similar email to me. Think Dwight Smithe or something so i occasionally get emails for DSmithe vs DSmithee. Anyways, one time i got a receipt for an obscene number of Hillary Clinton stickers…
BREAKING: Conservatives win a landslide majority in British Columbia, returning to power for the first time since 1928.
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So now I have Dwight’s address. So I sent him a bunch of political satire bumper stickers and a handful of Trump/MAGA things because I was a college student and thought it was funny. Anyways, all this to say, thoughts and prayers to DSmithe in BC during these trying times.
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Oh also for a while I was getting construction photos of Heineken and Pfizer process equipment as well as invitations to girls fast pitch softball. Wild. Hope Dwight is doing well.
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Drew Smithee, PE retweeted
We finally have an explanation for “Facebook is listening to me through my phone”. They’d never do that (and it’s not really possible). Turns out literally everyone else was — and then selling that to ad data brokers.
WTF, $3000 Samsung TV has an always-on mic, automatic content recognition, geo tracking, network mapping, and ships your data to Samsung + 400 partners. Bro Rooted a brand-new 2025 Samsung TV after noticing absurdly targeted ads. Firmware was locked down, so zero-days it was. Got a root shell. then found: always-on voice service, ACR, geo, full telemetry pipeline, and four separate DRM systems. This isn’t a bug, It’s the product bro.
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7 Days Until Halloween 🎃
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Drew Smithee, PE retweeted
Germany is running out of refineries, and it now admits that’s a problem. Economy Minister Katherina Reiche: “Whoever loses the refinery loses not only the supply for the gas station, but above all for the chemical complex.” Berlin now says it wants to stop more refineries closing. Look at the timing. Shell stopped processing crude at its 140,000 b/d Wesseling refinery last year. BP’s 250,000 b/d Gelsenkirchen has been up for sale since early 2025 with no buyer. Scotland lost Grangemouth, 150,000 b/d. Europe chose to import its diesel and jet fuel. Now the imports are the problem. Russian diesel exports hit a decade low. Gulf fuel exports run at about half of normal. US diesel costs about twice a barrel of crude. On Friday Germany’s stockpiling agency EBV put out a tender to sell diesel, heating oil and crude from its strategic reserves. In July it was still buying diesel to refill them. Germany’s reserve was meant for an emergency. It’s now dipping into it as winter starts. You can shut a refinery in a year. Building one takes most of a decade.
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