An Interview with Grid Status Co-founder Connor Waldoch
The Yale Clean Energy Forum had the opportunity to speak with Connor Waldoch. He is a co-founder and Head of Strategy for Grid Status, an energy data and analytics platform.
Explore GridStatus.io to see how their data can help you decipher the US energy landscape.
What’s the story of Grid Status’ Genesis?
We started as an open-source project two and half years ago. In the initial stages, I was working nights and weekends on the energy side of Grid Status and Max Kanter, our CEO and a co-founder, was working on the engineering side.
I was trying to determine what customers would be interested in Grid Status. What data should we include and how should we integrate this information with the platform? Now, we're at nine employees and ramping up. For the rest of the year, there's two major paths that we're going down. One, bring more analytical tooling onto the platform. For example, offering more ways to visualize data and introduce different calculations in complex ways to understand energy markets. The goal is to provide an additional research element so people can integrate more market content into the platform. We also want to expand our blog and focus on ways to keep people engaged.
What are you really excited about for Grid Status? Where do you hope to add value for clients?
One of the things that we're working on is helping clients with data that's hard to utilize on their own. For example, let’s say you are looking at five years of price data at a single bus (specific interconnection point on the grid) in ERCOT, Texas’ wholesale power market. The market has almost 18,000 buses so you can't just pull from one location. You're going to have to pull billions of rows of data, and most people aren’t causally equipped to handle that task.
We’re currently building a more accessible framework where it’s easier to see the statistics that drive investment decisions. As a former market monitor, I’m interested in modeling how the grid operates and why data like shift factors, which are basically how injections or withdrawals of one MW at one location influence every other element on the grid. That’s messy and interesting, and increasingly we are pulling in more complex data into the platform. There's a lot of companies that do energy analytics, usually with a consulting bend, and they're mostly oriented towards folks who are already doing work in that space. One of our long-term goals is to really expand the number of people who understand what’s going on with the grid.
How did you get into energy and how has your career evolved over time?
In college, I had a lot of freedom and took classes across pretty much every department. When I graduated in 2011, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the economy was looking particularly bad for new graduates. So, I went to graduate school for public policy at Indiana. When I was deciding my concentration, I was stuck between water and energy and ultimately chose energy. I ended up interning at a national lab in California and loved it. Also, being in the Bay Area was a great new experience. But at the end of the summer, I sat down with the group director, and he said we don't hire economics or policy people.
So, I went back and added a second master’s with more of an engineering focus, specifically energy systems engineering and pollution, and I ended up getting a job at Oak Ridge National Lab, the biggest national lab. I joined a group funded by DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy that was trying to rebuild hydropower capacity in the US, both in terms of physical capacity of the units and in terms of the human capital.
There was a lot of work to be done to get up to speed. The National Renewable Energy Lab puts out cost models every year for every kind of energy technology, including new technologies, used to inform different analysis. At the time, they did not have cost equations for hydropower for their technology baselines. This challenge became a major career inflection point for me.
Part of why I added that second masters was for technical skills. When I got to Oak Ridge, my boss said I’m not paying for MATLAB, the program I first learned. So, I had to learn Python. My boss gave me a big project and told me to write code to pull down every application for a permit for pumped storage that has ever been filed and then pull the cost and technical characteristics from that permit, which is then used to build a supply curve. He gave me a of couple months but made sure I was going to learn Python. As a result, I learned a whole set of technical skills and came to know a lot more about hydropower pumped storage.
Eventually, I moved to DC with my wife and found a job working at a small energy economics consulting firm called Potomac Economics. I didn’t fully understand what they did but was excited to do energy work. There’s a lot of energy economics consulting firms out there that, but there's only two in the US that do market monitoring.
The US is distinct in that we're the only ones that have this concept of independent market monitoring. You act as a quasi-regulatory watchdog for the markets while recommending design changes. Occasionally, we would act as market monitors for nonpower markets like regional greenhouse gas initiatives or consult for market design in other countries.
Eventually, I left Potomac and worked briefly at a virtual power plant (VPP) start up and then found my way to Black Mountain Energy Storage. I was looking to get back to working on larger topics in energy—looking at the gigawatt level. Funny enough, I ended up at Black Mountain purely by chance.
Throughout my career, I’ve been trying to answer my own questions, and I think that has been a big part of my career movement and success. It's a willingness to put in the work to answer these questions. Up until Black Mountain, I was used to settings where we didn’t have money, or we didn’t like to spend money. You just had to make things work and figure it out yourself. For example, when the Inflation Reduction Act initially passed, there was a big focus on energy communities, which included giant adders, 10% on your tax credit, which translates to billions of dollars over the lifespan of projects.
So, a week or two after the bill was passed, I just pulled up a bunch of data sets from the Bureau of Mines and other federal sources and put together my own map. The next morning, I tweeted it out, and I got this big response where people were asking “hey, where can I buy this map from you?”
Someone at Black Mountain was one of the people that reached out to me and was basically looking for someone to help with sitting batteries. My title was Director of Policy and Fundamentals. It was all pretty fortuitous. It was a small team, I was running the analytics, and diving into regulatory concerns. I was looking at day-to-day market outcomes, trying to figure out how the grid would change in response to power plants retiring and coming on, and monitoring our competition and substations. Ultimately, a lot of the work was supporting decisions about where to buy land and what the prospects are like in each market and region. All these experiences helped inform the work I now do at Grid Status.
What’s something that you wished you invested in early on in your career?
More exposure to the financial side of projects. Until I was the battery developer, I did not have a lot of experience with project finances, which is important in terms of making decisions about projects and informs how you might structure a deal.
I could tell you what might happen in the market and how market changes would affect the project. But in terms of the broader project finance picture, that's just not something I've ever done a ton of. I've always been more interested in reading a filing, writing code, or making a graph, rather than going through a financial model.
I've done some work in basically every power market, which makes it easier to converse on different topics with stakeholders. I enjoy being able to use code to extract relevant data from regulatory policy and use that data to pull together an argument based on what is happening.
How are you feeling right now about the general climate for jobs within clean energy?
When I started in energy, 14 years ago, solar was just starting to happen. Energy was nowhere near as hot as it is now. We were still in a period of basically no-load growth. At the time, I never would have thought that California's battery deployment would be on the front page of the New York Times like it is now. Compared to how it was 10 to 15 years ago, there are more jobs than ever, but it also depends upon where specifically you’re working in the clean energy sector.
There’s an immense demand for understanding how the power markets fit together, but there’s not many people exposed to the idea of a market monitor. And yet, there's more people and companies out there than ever trying to do work in clean energy. Right now, there’s a lot of uncertainty and a lot of demand. The hiring process is getting more tenuous, and you must put in some extra work to find the right thing for you.
As someone with experience in market design, what other countries’ grids do you find interesting?
Chile is a long, skinny country, and so their grid is also very long and skinny. Australia has similar problems because their grid curves around the coast with the major population centers. They both offer lessons on how to manage the difficulties of a long skinny grid. You can then try to apply these lessons to other grids at a semi macro level. This is what we examined with our recent article on poultry production in the Delmarva Peninsula, where the only connections are north. Additionally, in May, Ontario is revamping their whole market to make it like the U.S. markets—going from uniform pricing to locational marginal pricing. The Philippines is also interesting because I worked on projects to assist in some of their market design, and local market power was still quite relevant. There was a lot of work related to operators running their units straight through congestion, which costs a lot, but it didn’t matter because they knew the grid operator will just post hoc redo all the costs and pricing.
What regional energy intensive industries are driving load growth locally and how can clean energy be part of the solution?
In the Delmarva peninsula, chicken houses are pretty energy intensive, and at some point, they'll probably just build a bunch of solar. For a lot of these regional intensive load variants, they tend to be more rural, which makes it easier for wind and solar.
In West Texas, oil and gas really want to electrify operations because it’s cheaper and more reliable. Increasingly, this is also spilling out into the Southeastern corner of New Mexico, which is part of the Southwest Power Pool (SPP). If you review the load growth and congestion in SPP you can see that from last year Southeastern New Mexico is very hot.
What's a topic within the energy sector that you feel is uncovered in the news? What do you think is over-hyped?
Both sides of the load growth equation answer this question. There’s this total credulity to everything everyone says about projected load growth, but I think that we could stand a little more scrutiny as to which projects are real. How will it affect ratepayers? How will cost allocation occur? Who is building these projects?
On the other side, the discontinuity between how generators and load both get interconnected to the same transmission lines is underdiscussed. Where new load is being interconnected could offset some of those costs that the generators must pay, because the transmission owner is upgrading the lines to bring the load to their direct customer. There’re likely giant inefficiencies going on and getting these two systems in sync is a necessary solution. Ultimately, the dynamics of how load interconnection works versus the generator side is less examined.
What are you reading right now? What are you excited about? Where do you get Inspiration?
My team will generally look through a ton of different market materials, presentations, stakeholder calls, and then we'll just get on the phone for a couple hours and talk through all these things with the different markets. The stakeholder materials from different ISOs are particularly interesting. They're these dense information resources that most people aren't going to be reading.