Sam

At a nexus of finance, energy and technology. Also skiing.

[Sam @SlBrandin]

The most important thing I’ve ever learned about wholesale power is that energy is a commodity, capacity is not.

[Sam @SlBrandin]

Do we still produce graphene with scotch tape or have we made any progress here

[heiner @HeinrichKuttler]

@pfau Graphene was such a research money magnet back in 2010

[Sam @SlBrandin]

@willdepue People behave in weird ways once the means to the end become the end in and of itself. Sad

[Sam @SlBrandin]

One day I will find the right words and they will be simple

[Sam @SlBrandin]

Whatever cost society bears from “tech debt” is negligible compared to “infrastructure debt”

Japan operates half of its grid at 60hz and half at 50hz today because Osaka and Tokyo didn’t coordinate generator equipment procurement at the dawn of electrification in the 1890s

[Sam @SlBrandin]

@edcporter Do they still limit how much of a single projects MW can provide AS or did they patch all those legacy rules

[Sam @SlBrandin]

@ShanuMathew93 And I say this as someone who would be elated to serve as off take for commercially viable nuclear in the future given it does have a valuable role to play in portfolio construction

[Sam @SlBrandin]

Nuclear power faded out of relevance due to cost* and regulatory corruption. If those issues aren’t addressed head on then there just won’t be a nuclear renaissance.

There was no secret cabal acting against the nuclear industry, just incompetence

Same story with data centers

[Brad Gerstner @altcap]

A small group of activists shut down clean nuclear power - and now they are trying to do the same to data centers. It would plunge the country into a recession, high unemployment & risk our national security to China. 🇺🇸

[Sam @SlBrandin]

Is our current economy conscious?

At the very least it exhibits a form of aggregate agency through its capacity to allocate resources and respond to a dynamic environment via our public and private capital markets

[Jeffrey Ladish @JeffLadish]

If AI companies succeed at creating ‘a country of geniuses in a datacenter’, I think it’s likely that those entities will be conscious

[Sam @SlBrandin]

Nuclear proliferation seems to be going well as of late wrt to Iran

But yeah agree regulation in all forms is a huge portion of the cost. One can argue that cost is inextricable from scaling nuclear in a sufficiently safe manner (both operationally and geopolitically) but it may be in our national interest to do it anyways.

[Sam @SlBrandin]

marginal pricing makes new entrants compete on a marginal cost basis (assuming the same use profile)

The two statements you made are not consistent with each other, if there is sufficient demand from hyperscalers for bilateral offtake or to make a market for forward hedging, price wouldn’t be depressed

The goal of the naturally short not to make money on their hedges MtM, they just want to fuel their end use, so if the offtake is serious about incentivizing nuclear specifically (instead of just whatever is the most affordable and scalable supply) there will be a market for offtake making new supply economic even with insufficient wholesale pricing (although if your offtake is perpetually OTM than there is likely market distortion at play)

[Sam @SlBrandin]

@tylermacro10 @adf_energy_twt Yes, squarely in the cost bucket

[Aaron Stoll @Astoll15]

@SlBrandin @adf_energy_twt One could say capital follows ohms law😉

[Sam @SlBrandin]

In other words, when we do things poorly, we deserve to fail at a very fundamental level

No amount of posturing at a political level will resolve this

[Sam @SlBrandin]

To clarify my confusing phrasing, I’m not saying that data centers have the same binding constraints as nuclear generation

I mean to say, for the sake of serving their own selfish interests, the powered-land/data center development industry must engaged with (and optimize for) the subject matter of their primary constraints directly rather than creating some narrative attempting to delegitimize the reality of those constraints

[Sam @SlBrandin]

@adf_energy_twt Capital flows like water, path of least resistance. Capital isn’t going to go to uncompetitive solutions

[Sam @SlBrandin]

@0x45o That’s mean

[Sam @SlBrandin]

The environmental responsibility of the energy industry is to increase its profits

[Sam @SlBrandin]

*extrinsic societal risks are a factor embedded in cost