About

I started in utility resource planning, which in practice meant learning that the interesting part of a twenty-year plan is never the answer. It is the handful of assumptions the answer turns on, and whether anybody in the room can say out loud what they are.

From there I moved to the merchant side and spent years on trading risk, where the same lesson arrives faster and with money attached. A production cost model that is wrong about a fuel curve or a transmission constraint is not academically wrong; it is wrong on a position. That is a useful way to learn what a model is really telling you.

The last fifteen years have been data leadership — building the teams and the products that turn simulation output into something a trader, a developer, or an investment committee can act on. Wood Mackenzie, then Orennia. Today I am a Director at Alvarez & Marsal, building the firm's power forecasting platform. That is my job. This site is not it; nothing here is offered as a service, and everything here is written in my own time and in my own voice.

What I have actually modelled

ERCOT, WECC, and the Eastern Interconnection, in Aurora, EnCompass, and Plexos. Nodal and zonal. Capacity expansion and pure dispatch. Resource adequacy studies, merchant asset valuations, congestion and basis work, renewable integration cases, and the long-dated price decks that get bolted into project finance models and then quoted for years by people who never saw the assumption sheet.

My degree is a BSEE in power systems. The engineering matters less than people assume and more than modellers admit. You do not need it to run a case. You need it to know when the case is lying to you.

Why this site

Power market analysis has a communication problem. The models have become good and the explanations have not kept up. Most people who consume a price forecast — and that now includes developers, lenders, regulators, and boards — have no reliable way to interrogate one. They can see the number. They cannot see the fuel curve, the build assumptions, the reserve margin logic, or the four decisions someone made on a Thursday afternoon that moved the 2035 average by eleven dollars.

I do not think that is anyone's fault. I think it is a teaching gap, and I have been on both sides of it long enough to have opinions about how to close it. So the essays here work from the model outward: what it solves, what it assumes, what it cannot see, and what questions actually change your posture toward its output.

The name, and the mark

Fundamentals, as in fundamental analysis — modelling the physical and economic drivers of a price rather than reading the tape.

The mark says the same thing in one picture. It is a supply stack crossed by a load duration curve: cost rising to the right in blocks that get narrower and steeper, hours falling away to the right as the year runs down from peak. Where they meet is the price. The curve starts above the top step because peak load exceeds the economic stack, and that gap is scarcity. Most of what is worth arguing about in this business happens in that gap.

I write a newsletter when an essay is finished. Start with the essays, or see what I speak and teach on.