Don Mills’ Post

PJM's Capacity Sees Unprecedented Price Increases 👈 PJM's recent capacity auction has secured the necessary resources to meet the RTO reliability requirements for the 2025/2026 Delivery Year. The auction prices resulted in unprecedented increases due to an imbalance of supply and demand related to generation retirements, significant increases in electricity demand, and FERC-approved market reforms. 📈The auction resulted in a price of $269.92/MW-day for much of the PJM footprint, compared to $28.92/MW-day for the 2024/2025 Delivery Year. Demand Response and Peak Load Management strategies will be critical to help mitigate costs. These programs can directly reduce your capacity costs for the following Delivery Year and can provide monetary compensation for shedding load during peak demand periods. By participating in these programs, businesses can earn financial incentives and help contribute to grid stability. Contact us to learn more about cost management strategies to protect your organization from market and capacity volatility. #PJM #EnergyMarket #ElectricityPrices #DemandResponse #PeakLoadManagement #GridReliability #EnergyAdvisory https://hubs.la/Q02JFp7K0

This is what nuclear momentum looks like. Reversing our loss of clean nuclear supply.

This is something we need to be paying attention to. "The future growth of the power grid, too, is uncertain. Pennsylvania is part of the PJM grid, which covers 65 million people in 13 states and Washington, D.C. State leaders have warned that red tape and delays, along with early retirements of coal plants, have made it more difficult for the grid to deal with growing demand. Some legislators have proposed legislation to create a subsidy fund for grid upgrades to boost reliability. The rise of artificial intelligence has made those problems more pressing; Ohio expects power demand to grow by “three New York Cities” by 2028, straining the PJM grid."

Another important step along the road to a cleaner, greener energy mix in the UK.

CANDU is the need of the hour and this article talks about the immense economic benefits of deploying CANDU nuclear reactors in Canada to start with and the deployment of the 1GW Monark CANDU reactors to new and existing markets abroad.

This post highlights some of the challenges confronting the development of the most appropriate structure for our future power provision.

This news passed me by earlier this week - the UK has closed it's last coal-fired power station - apparently we're the first in the G7 to do it, and everyone's 👀 watching to see what that means. It's great that we're leading on this, but I've always felt uneasy about the transfer to nuclear energy, and I've thought we don't have our act together quite yet so that renewables can lead the charge. 💡 So I decided to do a little extra reading around on this. According to Carbon Brief in 2023: 🍃 43% of our electricity was produced from renewable energy sources 🍃 13% from nuclear power 🍃 31% from gas 🍃 just over 1% from coal and just below 1% from oil 🍃 and 10% was from imports or other sources like waste incineration. To be fair these figures are more reassuring than I expected, although I hadn't realised how much gas was used in the process as well. I guess that's the area governments and energy producers are already focusing on next. Another reassuring note was that apparently our electricity demand has been reducing, down 21% since 2008. Again not what I expected when we hear a lot about data centres being needed for all our modern tech and how power intensive they are. I'm sure there's lots more work to be done to achieve decarbonisation of the grid by 2035, but it seems we're a lot closer to achieving that, than I first thought. Did you see this in the news? What were your thoughts?

The PJM Capacity Auction on 7/31/24 resulted in capacity pricing up to 800% higher than current rates beginning 6/1/2025. This article indicates the next auction could result in even higher pricing! Reducing and controlling facility electricity demand is paramount! https://lnkd.in/eQ9_B64H

Best invest in Building and talking about Fusion power, space, maritime propulsion systems and industry as data centres are. Great Headline, Guardian on Nuclear fission. https://lnkd.in/g8sMZtpR People talk about Nuclear (meaning Fission) and fail to discuss fusion. https://lnkd.in/ge_aeX7M The nuclear fission industry is ignorant of what's happening around it. It must pull its collective uranium heads out of the sand and prepare to enter the commercially growing fusion energy industry. Fission is moving towards obsolescence at an ever-increasing pace, as it is "out of step, out of time, out of place, and soon to be out of Fuel" and merely temporary. https://lnkd.in/gbd_mZqk By 2028, Helion is expected to start producing electricity from its first fusion commercial power plant, which will provide electricity to Microsoft. The plant will produce at least 50 MWe after an initial ramp-up period. https://lnkd.in/gY9J3MQY Now, see what is happening in the world of the fusion industry. https://lnkd.in/g9hMBD7a As fission trebles, fuel shortage is increasingly real, https://lnkd.in/gze5rwpr

Note the fuel circulation pump on the left hand side of the photograph (the cylindrical structure with the tie rods around the edge). Overall a really interesting piece of history and technology development.