astanway

Google ostensibly offers this as well. However - I’m in the middle of moving us to Azure and I have more details on the Google deal: you only have 60 days to complete the migration and then you must terminate your billing account. It’s a total window dressing of an offer and completely unrealistic for any reasonably large organization to use. Malicious compliance at its finest and I hope they get sued by the EU for it until they make it a more reasonable offer.

Feels like this would make a total mess of a cap table. It’s effectively equity in all the ways that matter for minority preferred shareholders, except that it isn’t represented on the cap table and it’s got baked in pari passu treatment, which growth investors (rightfully so) won’t like. Even convertible notes mess with cap tables in ways I’d rather not repeat, as it prevents accurately valuing employee equity grants. Also, none of this would be eligible for QSBS, which is a knock against it for the investor.

Additionally - what is the purpose of repurchases if they don't also reduce the exposure the company has to claims on liquidation? Noting that "repurchase" is probably dangerous nomenclature - if these were to actually be interpreted as equity repurchases by the IRS, it could endanger QSBS status for all shareholders.

What a farce. Everyone with a pulse can see the damage that Facebook has caused to our democracy and around the world. Facebook employees have a black stain on their resumes that they will need to answer for for the rest of their careers.

Yep - this is what 99% of electricity retailers do.

For wholesale players: yes. If you're a retailer and you buy an electricity future and then only use half of it across your customer base, you sell the remainder at real time prices. And for generator, selling real time power is the entire business model.

For consumers: no, not generally. Some markets have schemes to sell leftover solar power at real time prices, but I believe these are being phased out. Both grids and markets are by and large not set up yet for full two-way markets between consumers and producers.

$1M for a six week “EM plus two” engagement is on the high side, but it’s about par for the course for most McKinsey contracts. The standard is usually $500k-$1M for that kind of engagement. I think this is kind of a non-story for anyone who is actually familiar with the consulting business model. The brand is all McKinsey really has, and they are very quick to offer free engagements to protect the brand if true value isn’t being delivered.

That's really false. They are professional drivers, it's much safer to bike around them as opposed to regular people who don't understand how NYC streets work.

Realistically a price higher than that wouldn't really have any effect on incentivizing generators any more, since there is a limit to how fast they can ramp up, how much spinning reserve capacity they have etc. So, it mostly just serves to protect the market from falling off the rails. The grid operation itself is actually largely disconnected from the market - the ISO primarily calls the shots with scheduling regardless of what the market is doing.

It’s overpaying if anything. Why should the utility be forced to pay retail RTM rates for power that they could have bought wholesale a month before if they actually needed it? Utility ratecase logic often has many ratepayer-unfriendly motivations but this line of reasoning is legitimate, imo.

Utility scale batteries are not yet a proven and deployed technology. Not to say there aren’t successes - Aliso Canyon and the AEMO installation in Australia have both been very well received by their respective system operators. But there’s a very long way to go before batteries will exist as a viable, general alternative to natural gas peaker plants.