Energy Abundance & Climate Transition • Big Batteries🔋☢️ 🥑• Amateur Outdoorsman • First Gen 🇨🇦
Toronto, Ontario
Joined March 2016
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Alex Simakov retweeted
We’re bringing the magic of Waymo to Toronto! 🇨🇦
In the coming days, you’ll begin seeing Waymo’s all-electric vehicles driving through Toronto’s streets as we lay the groundwork for our ride-hailing service.
Our goal is to begin serving riders in 2028.
Sign up for future updates: waymo.com/waymo-in-canada
Alex Simakov retweeted
I frankly do not think this claim is correct.
The permitting reform bill will not impact *how many* data centers are built. That is driven by compute demand.
What it *will* impact is whether the data centers that are going to be build get connected to the grid (enabling them to be decarbonized) in exchange for forcing them to pay for grid upgrades (a win-win), verses power themselves Behind-the-Meter using inefficient stand-alone fossil gas turbines (a lose-lose for climate and the environment).
Alex Simakov retweeted
“We don’t need new transmission, we can optimize the grid we’ve already paid for.”
Alex Simakov retweeted
I’m moderately optimistic that the data center backlash has peaked. A month ago there were many calls for moratoriums. The discussion feels more nuanced even in the past few weeks, changing from whether to ban to how to develop responsibly.
More politicians are leaning in by directly speaking to their constituents about the issue, the concerns, and the safeguards. Developed correctly, data centers can be a benefit to a community.
Sentiment on this issue spiraled so quickly with the lack of credible messengers. Communities are understandably skeptical of what the hyperscalers say. They need to hear directly from elected leaders who can acknowledge the tradeoffs, explain the protections, and make the case for responsible development. The politics remains very risky, but leaders are supposed to lead.
Alex Simakov retweeted
Central Asia lost 40% of its population and was getting ethnically replaced by forced deportations 90 years ago.
Today they are doing stuff like this. Never blackpill.
Ever.
Alex Simakov retweeted
"The massive data center build-out may prove to be the critical platform for commercializing clean, reliable, low-carbon electricity-generation technology that the world will need to tackle climate change."
My latest @WSJopinion.
Alex Simakov retweeted
Pretty cool - sankey diagram (power nerds know) for how $100 of AI capex flows
Source: BNP*
*Prior version said Bernstein; mixed up my Bs - idiot!
Alex Simakov retweeted
Rainmaker just produced ~19M gallons of water in Alaska via next-gen cloud seeding over 3 hours of operations.
We are the first company to provably produce precipitation in Alaska. As promised, we’ve linked our white paper and relevant data.
In the future, Rainmaker will protect and restore glaciers with man-made snowfall.
Immediately, this demonstration shows how Rainmaker will add new water to the Colorado River and Great Salt Lake in the coming months.
We turned around this analysis and white paper just a couple days after operating. There are many data sources I want to deepen our understanding of the atmosphere and increase our provable production; we’re building the instruments to collect that data in subsequent operations. But at Rainmaker, we won’t tout LOIs, simulations, or lab tests. What matters is physically measuring that you’ve affected the atmosphere; proving that we’ve produced water. We prefer sharing only the tech that has proven to make more water for farms, industries, and ecosystems in need.
Expect a regular cadence of these from us as we build the best atmospheric science lab in the world. Feedback is welcome in the interim.
Rainmaker Century.
rainmaker.com/blog/alaska-va…
Alex Simakov retweeted
In all seriousness I think this represents both a disturbing society-level inability to process basic facts that involve numbers, a lurch toward degrowth on the left and right, and a failure of mainstream journalism to go beyond just nodding along to the "concerns" of everyday people without checking to see if they're the result of a game of telephone that leads back to nothing
Alex Simakov retweeted
As someone who ran a similar program in a different market, I don't think this is going to save money in CA. In fact, likely make energy more expensive.
First principles why👇
Listen up: free electricity.
It’s called Power Hour - providing up to two hours of free electricity for millions of California households.
Working families could save approximately $1,000 a year on their electricity bills.
I’m looking forward to getting this done for California families when I’m in office.
Alex Simakov retweeted
AI may be the most important technology of our lifetimes and data centre compute is increasingly a key factor of competitiveness.
This explainer from @ABDanielleSmith is the gold standard among North American political leaders for educating an uncertain yet open-minded public.
Most Albertans have probably seen the headlines about companies wanting to invest in and build AI data centres in Alberta.
Many Albertans are excited about that, but others have legitimate questions.
Here are the answers to 6 common questions on everything from power to water to land use and how these investments will financially benefit our province now and in the future.
Alex Simakov retweeted
As a Danish taxpayer, I think this is the best spent money ever. We will happily continue to pay to help a European country survive and to stop an existential threat against Europe.
We are just wondering why so many other countries are free-riding and barely contributing?
Alex Simakov retweeted
On this day in 1793, Scottish-Canadian explorer Sir Alexander Mackenzie reached the Pacific Ocean. It was the first crossing of the North American Continent north of Mexico, beating Lewis and Clark by 12 years, & is regarded as one of the greatest expeditions in Canadian history.
Alex Simakov retweeted
This is such a clear example of the inherent limits of abundance liberalism. They can talk a good game but as long as they’re beholden to a coalition of the anti-development left and status-quoist boomers, they can’t be trusted to actually build stuff.
Alex Simakov retweeted
We look forward to continuing to work to advance the expansion of Billy Bishop Airport. The benefits are clear: the project will contribute up to $8.5 billion to Canada's economy every year, create thousands of jobs, and improve connectivity for millions of travellers and businesses across Ontario, North America and beyond.
As this work continues, we look forward to seeing and anticipate a plan that ensures the project protects public spaces, including the Toronto Islands, addresses potential noise and environmental impacts, expands and improves Little Norway Park, supports new housing opportunities in the area, and delivers lasting benefits for local communities.
Alex Simakov retweeted
The national team and program has undeniably made immense progress, and the World Cup represents that. If you think about where it was decade ago it's a night and day difference. Getting out of the group and winning a knockout game for the first time is progress and something to be proud of.
But there's still much more to go and I think the way its going, the game and national team really can reach another level here. Shouldn't look at this as "job finished" but "job started."
(I will be publishing a long essay on the game in Canada this week also for @2067Journal).
Alex Simakov retweeted
The current clubs of this Cape Verde XI:
No club
Columbus Crew
Shamrock Rovers
Al-Bataeh
Trabzonspor
FC Krasnodar
No club
Ludogorets Razgrad
Puskás Akadémia
No club
İstanbul Başakşehir
What we have witnessed tonight against the reigning champions is truly remarkable.
Alex Simakov retweeted
I don’t know why people aren’t willing to say this, but industry usually subsidizes residential consumers, not the other way around.
It’s vastly cheaper to serve a large load at transmission voltage than to build more transmission, substations, distribution, etc. to serve load that is spread out.
On top of that, industrial demands are more consistent users, so for every watt of capacity, you serve more watt hours of demand.
Industrial rates are cheaper than residential rates because *it is actually cheaper* to serve industry, NOT because residential users are subsidizing industry.
When you have more industry, you get better utilization and lower costs. Forcing industry to subsidize residential consumers means you get less industry, and higher costs overall.
Surprise - another study finds no relationship between electricity price increases and data centers. That list includes includes LBNL, Brattle, Charles River, EPRI, Columbia, etc.
To be clear, there's a difference between historical relationship and go-forward dynamics but it's important to recognize the complicated relationship in electricity prices (system costs, large fixed price assets that need to be amortized).
Summary + I'll link the other studies below.
Claim: Historical data center growth has not translated into higher household power prices.
Evidence: States with more data center growth did not see larger rate hikes. Virginia looks normal; California’s spike is mostly wildfire/grid costs.
Cost-shift concern: The paper finds no evidence that data centers lowered C&I rates while pushing costs onto residential customers.
Causal estimate: A doubling of data center capacity is estimated to lower residential rates by ~4%.
Why: Large new load may spread fixed grid costs over more electricity sales, creating economies of scale.
Caveat: AI-era growth may be different because scale, speed, grid bottlenecks, and supply constraints are much more severe.
Alex Simakov retweeted
“If utilities and RTOs treat every new data center request as an all-or-nothing proposition by requiring fully firm transmission service backed by a decade of multi-million-dollar network upgrades, developers simply won’t wait. They will ‘defect’ from the grid entirely, bypassing the system to construct privately financed, behind-the-meter generation. ‘Flexible interconnection,’ where data centers connect years faster by agreeing to real-time curtailment during grid stress by either modulating their load when called upon or utilizing on-site generation or batteries, is the strategic safety valve that keeps these large customers integrated into the bulk power system. This approach can help insulate existing grid customers from negative reliability impacts the new load could otherwise create, and to enhance system affordability by reducing the total amount of grid upgrades required.” —@GridLabEnergy’s @RicOConnell8