Stratnergy has been on a break. While on a break, subscriber numbers have grown. In fact, more readers have subscribed during the break than during the phase of active posting. What does that mean?
The break has allowed me to finish a few other projects and to think about where Stratnergy might go next. What is interesting? What is worth spending time on? Which questions have the power to generate valuable discussion?
Thank you for being one of forty subscribers, thank you for your interest, for your comments, for your support.
The aim of this post is to reflect on the last twelve posts and think about the next phase of the Stratnergy project.
Simple questions
Out of all the posts so far, Power and Capacity remains the most interesting to me. It is also the most popular. The underlying question is simple: How much is extra power worth? There are no simple answers. Instead, one question leads to the next: What is your view on extreme market scenarios? How do you work backwards from your views of the energy market to design the right system?
We are wired to seek answers and to avoid uncertainty but we might consider spending more time with questions. The energy industry is a rich source of fascinating questions, which relate to how we live, law and morality, what our future will be like, technology, what we prioritise and value, economics.
Conventional Wisdom
Stratnergy started with the aim of building conversations and connections on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a wonderful source of questions and attempts to answer them. Participating on LinkedIn can be fascinating, but also disconcerting. Social media is designed to push our buttons. LinkedIn plays with the complexity of balancing professional and personal personas. I needed a break to think about the way LinkedIn works (and doesn’t work). I am most inspired by Gregor Hohpe’s approach.
One of the aims of Stratnergy is to identify examples of conventional wisdom, or “LinkedIn wisdom.” What voices do we rely on? What makes us think that they are right?
It will be convenient to have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability, and it should be a term that emphasizes this predictability. I shall refer to these ideas henceforth as the conventional wisdom.
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society
Active Listening
More often than not the best thing we can do is to stop what we’re doing and to simply listen. What can we find when we put all our focus into paying attention?
There are many ways of communicating, and different ways of listening. Stratnergy is primarily a ‘newsletter’ or ‘blog’. The focus, therefore, is on written material. One of the aims of Stratnergy is to ‘listen’ by reading carefully, reflecting, finding threads to develop. What lies behind the surface of a quarterly report? Can we glean something interesting, perhaps something revealing?
UK Battery Energy Storage Developments, Q1 2024
www.stratnergy.com/p/uk-battery-energy-storage-developments-q1-2024
FCR-Efficiency and the Gore Street Capital Results
www.stratnergy.com/p/fcrefficiency-gore-street-capital-results
Having a bit of fun…
It’s all too easy to take things too seriously. Energy is a serious business, but there’s also a lot of fun to be had.
Sometimes our attempts to make sense of something work, sometimes they don’t… Stratnergy is about ‘having a go’ and not worrying too much about the results. One must take things seriously, but one must know one’s limits…
The most fun I’ve had so far was to try and build a toy example to explore the simple question raised in the very first post. The idea to do so emerged out of the discussion generated through Stratnergy.
A simple (toy) framework to explore BESS Configurations
Strategy-independent caricatures
www.stratnergy.com/p/simple-toy-framework-explore-bess-configurations
The initial phase of Stratnergy involved the goal of posting every week. I ran out of steam after 12 weeks. It was interesting to set that constraint. In the next phase, I will experiment with an irregular schedule.
What next?
Here are some topics and themes that I’m thinking about….
I would like to explore my reaction to a post by an oil & gas major justifying its development of a large pipeline in East Africa through the lens of an essay by a legal scholar on the relationship between law and morality.
Back to the basics: I’d like to spend time understanding how batteries work. Here we are, all excited about energy storage. To what extent do I understand how the technology works?
I would like to connect this newsletter to two other projects that I have. Negotiating today is a Substack project where I have been collecting thoughts on the subject of “negotiation.” I’ve long neglected this project, but feel that the Energy Industry is a rich source of scenarios that can be viewed from a “better conflicts” or “negotiation” perspective. Guanxi is another Substack project where I reflect on my interest in China and Chinese language. The renewable energy industry is strongly connected to China, a connection that I would like to explore further.