John Bistline
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bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline
@bistline.bsky.social
5.5K followers 480 following 450 posts

Energy systems modeling, economics, policy | IPCC, NCA, Stanford/CMU alum | Views my own

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Engineering 28%
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bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 3d
Let's check in on clean energy deployment in California and Texas. Texas surpassed California as the leading utility-scale solar state in 2025 with roughly 12.9 GW added last year alone. CA still has more total solar when you include distributed capacity. And lots of batteries everywhere.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 4d
Check out the original IIASA paper here: pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/40...

Here's the 2025 update: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
pure.iiasa.ac.at

Reposted by Daniel Huppmann, Hisham Zerriffi

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 4d
Your great-great-grandparents commuted about an hour a day. So did Roman merchants. So do you. No matter how fast we make transportation, people just live farther from work regardless of income. It's called Marchetti's constant, basically Jevons paradox for your morning commute.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 5d
Read it here: rdcu.be/eS7lj

This is similar to Zheng et al.: Even >3x interregional transmission only cuts costs of a zero-emissions 2050 system by ~7% (lots of substitutes: storage, siting, nuclear). Reliability benefits can be larger than pure $ savings: arxiv.org/abs/2402.14189
Implications of policy-driven transmission expansion for costs, emissions and reliability in the USA
Nature Energy - Interregional transmission is key to a cost-efficient, reliable and cleaner US grid. Senga et al. find that current legislative proposals can increase reliability while capturing...
rdcu.be

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 5d
Transmission discourse is usually: "Build more lines = cheaper + cleaner." This great new paper by @knittelmit.bsky.social and others is spicier: The big tradeoff is cost vs. extreme weather reliability, where interconnection is an insurance policy.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 6d
Great article, Zeke! Deep decarbonization scenarios for the U.S. also show a "merit order" for fossil fuel reductions, though there are many pathways for reaching net-zero emissions (bottom row), depending on assumptions about policies, technologies, regional resources, etc.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 9d
Carbon isn’t the only thing that matters for carbon capture. New modeling from my colleagues shows amine solvent emissions can create nitrosamines/nitramines and even affect PM2.5. But acid wash can dramatically cut these levels.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 10d
New year, new profile pic. Same ideas, just a few more gray hairs from 2025.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 11d
Starting the year with a little reflection. Happy 2026.

Reposted by Peter Thorne

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 12d
Without intervention, higher income is strongly associated with higher car dependence across ~800 cities; doubling income ~37% more car journeys.

Electrifying a car-dependent city still means congestion, space, safety risk, and asphalt eating your budget.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 19d
Santa's wearing shorts this year. Christmas 2025 is forecast to be the warmest mean temperature across the Contiguous U.S. in the past half century.

h/t my colleague Erik Smith for the analysis: 2025 temps from GFS 06z, 1975-2024 from ERA5, area-weighted (lat) and averaged over the CONUS.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 19d
Check out the full report here from UCSB researchers (including @leahstokes.bsky.social): www.2035initiative.com/clean-manufa...

The EMF 37 study also discusses opportunities and challenges in this space: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
The Clean Heat Climate Opportunity — The 2035 Initiative at UC Santa Barbara
A Near-Term Roadmap for Electrifying Low- and Medium-Temperature Industrial Heat
www.2035initiative.com

Reposted by Leah Stokes

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 19d
"Hard-to-abate" is sometimes code for "we haven't looked closely yet." This great new report shows opportunities for clean heat (low/medium-temp industrial process heat) through electrification, which also has public health benefits.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 20d
Solar wait times in interconnection queues are increasing, too.

Reposted by Paul Lehmann, Juan Cole, Paul Nightingale

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 24d
Wind developers: "We're ready to build."

Grid: "Please hold. Your call is very important to us. Estimated wait time... 8 to 12 years."

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 26d
South Australia has an impressive amount of wind and rooftop solar. It also relies on gas and imports, which range from 2% of daily demand (Nov. 17 on the left) to >80% (Jun. 26 on the right). This great chart is courtesy of my colleague Mike Caravaggio.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 27d
Bottom line: System planning extends beyond minimizing costs. If we want models to inform planning and policy, non-economic deployment limits need to be explicit, transparent, and stress-tested.

Check out our new EPRI and RFF report here: www.epri.com/research/pro...

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 27d
Why this matters: When land or deployment is constrained, the system substitutes.

More solar instead of wind, more gas or CCS in some regions, higher costs, different transmission needs. Pathways diverge.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 27d
Land use is a great example.

Wind is abundant, but setbacks, federal lands, and local ordinances dramatically shrink what's developable.

Our new EPRI analysis shows this vividly: Layering land restrictions and local ordinances shrinks land far more than many models assume.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 27d
One common workaround: proxy constraints.

Instead of pretending everything is deployable everywhere, models can limit annual build rates, restrict land availability, or cap technologies, testing how sensitive pathways are to real-world bottlenecks.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 27d
Most energy models are good at technology costs, fuel substitution, and system value. They're much weaker at things like:
- Where projects are allowed
- How fast infrastructure can scale
- Whether communities say "yes"
Ignoring these can bias results toward unrealistically smooth buildouts.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 27d
#ModelingMonday: A key modeling assumption with big consequences is non-economic deployment constraints.

Permitting, land access, local ordinances, supply chains, social acceptance. These shape what can get built but are tricky to model.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · Dec 12
The full report is here: www.epri.com/research/pro...

There's an interactive site here: interactive.epri.com/wattworks/p/1
EPRI Home
The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) conducts research, development, and demonstration projects for the benefit of the public in the United States and internationally. As an independent, nonpr...
www.epri.com

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · Dec 12
AI looks great on multiple-choice... but ask it to explain something and the wheels come off. EPRI's new benchmarking shows a 27-point accuracy drop when moving from MCQs to open-ended questions. Apparently the electric sector is more complex than the International Math Olympiad.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · Dec 10
Yes, electricity demand in Texas is growing rapidly relative to the past, but very unlikely to be "doubling in the next ten years" rapidly.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · Dec 10
ERCOT's implementation of HB 5066 meant that for the 2024 planning cycle it accepted TSP "officer letter" loads as reasonable when building the forecast: www.ercot.com/files/docs/2...
www.ercot.com

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · Dec 10
Part of this is growth in requests from large loads, esp. data centers: www.ercot.com/files/docs/2...

But the very large jump between 23-24 is partially due to HB 5066 requiring ERCOT to consider load forecasts provided by utilities/TSPs, incl. loads that don’t have signed IX agreements.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · Dec 10
I sometimes refer to ERCOT load projections as "Loch Ness Monster" curves for multiple reasons.

Reposted by Richard S.J. Tol

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · Dec 10
Batteries aren't the future; they're in the grids many states are building now. In a few years, storage has gone from a rounding error to double-digit capacity shares in AZ, NV, CA, TX, and others. The energy storage map is being redrawn a lot faster than people think.

bistline.bsky.social
John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · Dec 9
More here: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

It's interesting to see benefits extend far outside the target zone, although they happened on a smaller scale.
A first look into congestion pricing in the United States: PM2.5 impacts after six months of New York City cordon pricing
npj Clean Air - A first look into congestion pricing in the United States: PM2.5 impacts after six months of New York City cordon pricing
www.nature.com