I was just listening to the Volts episode on Denmark from 16 Oct. david roberts put it to Kristian Jensen (CEO of Green Power Denmark) that the country has about 70 GW of requests to connect to a grid with roughly a 7 GW peak. Jensen's answer was basically: that's not real demand.

His explanation is the familiar one. data centre developers are "throwing darts at a board", applying at three or four locations when they only want one, plus batteries hoping to get on. he thinks something like 20 to 25 GW in ten years is the realistic target, which is still a huge increase.

He also made a point I found more interesting.. some existing data centres already have a big connection they barely use, his example was a 1 GW connection running about 200 MW. so there's headroom sitting inside contracts that are already signed.

Env consultant here, and this is the bit that bugs me from the planning side. a queue is a count of applications, not a load forecast. if a network plan or a cumulative impact assessment takes the queue as an input, it inherits every duplicate, and you end up sizing substations, lines and land take for load that never shows up. and going the other way, nobody's counting the unused capacity in existing connections.

the numbers I'd actually want are what share of requests ever reach energisation, and requested vs actually used capacity on existing connections. as far as I can tell neither gets published routinely, in Denmark or elsewhere.

For people who do grid planning or interconnection work: what do you actually use instead of the raw queue? historical attrition rates, deposits/milestones, something else?

sources:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-up-with-denmark

IOUs are unsustainable. People cannot afford this profiteering madness.

The states analysis reveals a more accurate but still conservative estimate of a 150% increase.

Investor returns should never come before essential life services.

Fewer and Fewer countries are self sufficient in Oil.

Denmark used to be a major exporter producing some 400 000 Barrels/day back in 2004. Now down to just 70 000 Barrels a day and it needs 150 000 Barrels/day - so it has to import oil now.

Romania down from 300 000 Barrels/day in the 70s to 50 000 now.

The UK - also a major exporter until two decades ago - down from 2.8 Million Barrels/day to 600 000/day between 1998 and 2026.

Indonesia another previous major exporter went down from 1.7 Million Barrels in 1977 to 600 000 Barrels in 2026. Bali is now experiencing oil shortages while it used to export oil half a century ago.

During the last half century, several dozen countries have reached Peak Oil and produce only a fraction of their peak production.

Yet when we talk about Peak Oil globally, many people claim that we can never reach it because we will find always new oil.

Seems like denial to me.

Many countries have used up most of the oil they have and have not found any additional reserves.

Many others are projected to run out within the next 10-15 years.

Oil is getting harder to extract because we have used up the easiest to get oil.

To claim that we will always find new reserves (that are worth/economical to extract) and therefore Oil can run out in individual countries but never globally, seems like delusion to me.

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