charles orr
31 posts
- Replying to @chrlsorrWhat happened yesterday afternoon in Spain: Initial trip in the South West (likely solar outage). Grid self-recovers. +1.5 seconds: second generation loss. +3.5 seconds: French interconnector trips due to the instability (another 2.5 GW down). Cue a massive renewables drop...
- Replying to @chrlsorrUK 9 Aug 2019: Lightening hits a 400kv cable which trips Hornsea 1 (-737 MW) + Little Barford (-244 MW) and smaller distributed generation (-1.9 GW total). Frequency hit 48.8 Hz; 1 GW demand shed. 1m customers lose power but are re-energised within 45 min.
- the beautiful thing about DEXs is you can even decentralise your own slippage 🙃One trader VS. Hyperliquid’s HLP vault. $4M gone. No bug. No exploit. Just a brutal game of liquidity mechanics. Here’s how they pulled it off. 🧵👇
- Making 1 big kettle every 15 years is priceyI asked the Fuse Project Engineering team to do a deep dive into Nuclear. TLDR: We are bearish on Nuclear.
- Replying to @chrlsorr8/ On the cost curve of solar: Even if solar costs begin to level out: Power electronics will continue to get cheaper as semiconductor tech improves. Battery chemistries will keep improving, allowing for cheaper short term storage into peak demand. Novel panel tech like
- Many critical transformers/switchgear in the network are aging (along with the only people who know how to operate them properly)… not convinced this is a one-offA fire at our North Hyde substation in West London has damaged equipment, leading to a loss of power supply in the area. We are working at speed to restore power supplies as quickly as possible. We are working alongside the DNO for the area, SSEN, to reconnect affected domestic
- Replying to @chrlsorr1/ On increased costs for increased penetration of renewables: Jack is right, the variability of renewables is a problem, and it does become more difficult as their penetration increases. However, nuclear doesn’t coexist well in this environment, and the renewable buildout shows
- Replying to @chrlsorr2/ On the cost of design vs cost of regulation: Agreed that regulation is broken, and accounts for a large proportion of the cost associated with design. However, even with a friendly or non-existent regulator, the costs we associate with regulation will not disappear,
- Replying to @chrlsorr6/ On the point that Nuclear reactors aren’t “start-up level risk”: We agree that in some countries the risk is much lower. However, other countries have seen similar problems to the UK: In the US and EU, there are four traditional large scale reactor designers two of which
- Replying to @chrlsorr4/ On funding: The numbers above focused on funding R&D costs (and, as Jack mentions, the associated regulation costs of design). PPAs, CfDs and regulated returns are de-risking mechanisms to get financing to build a plant. They guarantee revenue, but they don’t fund the
- Turns out the top business idea of the last decade was just to provide exposure to the most liquid asset on earthTether was the 7th largest buyer of U.S. Treasuries in 2024, compared to Countries 🤯
