“Facilitating Technology That Addresses Uncertainty” Featuring Dr. Karl Meeusen, Wärtsilä

Today we had a fantastic guest for our COBT discussion, Dr. Karl Meeusen. Karl serves as Director of Markets, Legislative and Regulatory Policy at Wärtsilä. His career in electricity markets and energy policy has included four years at the California Public Utilities Commission and most recently nearly ten years at California ISO. Now at Wärtsilä, Karl advises policy makers and market participants on power system modeling requirements and resource capabilities. There are many layers to the complexity of modeling reliability in a renewable system and we learned a lot in our session.

Wärtsilä was established over 180 years ago and is based in Finland. They develop power plants, hybrid solutions, energy storage and optimization technology designed to increase efficiency and promote reliability. To date, they have deployed 76 GW of power plant capacity and more than 110 energy storage systems to 180 countries around the world. We explored a range of topics from current regulator sentiment, Wärtsilä's history, the impact of volatility on utility modeling and forecasting, Wärtsilä's toolbox of interesting technology including modular natural gas engines, their key steps to "Front-Load Net Zero," the value of flexibility in a renewable system, and more. Thank you Karl for sharing your time and expertise with us all!

Mike Bradley started us off with two key topics today. First, he highlighted the upcoming CPI and PPI data releases this week and noted the EIA released their short-term energy outlook with the IEA and OPEC releasing their reports on Thursday. Then, with earnings season mostly behind us, he shared Q2'22 commodity and equity themes with a look at market performance from the day before second quarter earnings started through to today. Colin Fenton painted the big picture with Friday's Employment Situation report, pointing out that the payrolls statistics excludes agricultural and gig workers, signs that the inflationary pressures are beginning to affect the labor pool, and signs of the other ingredients that typically combine to make U.S. recessions.

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