Writing
Grid, load, and the operator stack
European energy, written from the operations side.
- ai · inference · training
Inference and training are two different grid loads. Stop siting them like they're one.
The industry talks about AI power as one thing. It's at least two, and the deployments that grow fastest from here look almost nothing like the training clusters most operator diligence checklists were written for.
- flexibility · uk · markets
The UK balancing mechanism is sitting there for anyone paying attention
Last week's post walked through the EU ancillary market stack. The UK has none of those platforms and a better market for data centre flexibility anyway.
- flexibility · europe · markets
aFRR, FCR, and the alphabet soup of ancillary markets
Four services, five platforms, nine acronyms, and a revenue stack most DC operators have never bid into. Here's what the soup actually contains.
- fragmentation · bms · operations
Why every BMS vendor ships a portal nobody wants
BACnet was designed to end vendor lock-in thirty years ago. The vendors still ship proprietary portals. The operators still log into them. Everyone knows this is bad.
- europe · grid-constraint · germany
Redispatch 2.0 and the German squeeze
Germany is doing quietly what the Netherlands and Ireland did loudly. No moratorium. Just €2.8 billion a year of redispatch costs and a grid fee reform that changes everything.
- europe · grid-constraint · uk
The UK did the painful thing with its connection queue. Now comes the harder part.
Britain culled 700 GW of zombie projects from the queue in 2025. Then the demand queue grew 205% in seven months. Data centres are most of it.
- europe · grid-constraint · ireland
Dublin's DC pause, four years in
Ireland became the canary for grid-constrained DC markets. Four years on, most people still haven't read the lesson properly.
- flexibility · europe · markets
Reading European imbalance prices — an operator's primer
A curve that runs every 15 minutes on every major European grid. Most data centre operators don't look at it. The ones who do make money.
- ai · forecasting · operations
Why your load forecast breaks the moment training starts
Forecasting libraries built in 2021 weren't trained on square-wave loads. Most DC operators are running models that quietly broke.
- europe · grid-constraint · netherlands
Two years into the Dutch grid moratorium — what actually changed
The moratorium didn't kill Dutch data centres. It forced them to learn a skill nobody else in Europe has yet.
- fragmentation · operations
The sixteen tabs problem
How DC energy ops accumulated fourteen systems that don't talk to each other. It's not a technology problem.
- category · derms · ems
DERMS, EMS, DCIM — three categories pretending to be one
Three product categories with overlapping acronyms, different origins, and none of them built for what AI data centres now need.