This is the first live-blog of my spring 2026 DERs class.
I love the idea of writing up my thoughts as short essays, but have done little of it over the last few years. Instead, I’ve written a fair number of research papers — usually polished, dense, long, and inaccessible to non-experts — and a lot of social media posts. For whatever reason, I rarely find or make time to write stuff in the middle ground: A little longer and more formal than a post or thread on social media, but a lot shorter and less formal than a research paper.
In hopes of changing that, this year I plan to live-blog my class on Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). I have three goals:
- To organize my thoughts and convey the main points with minimal math.
- To offer students a written complement to the lectures.
- To share the main ideas with a broader audience.
I hope to post at least once per week. Ideally twice. In a perfect world, I’d post before lecturing, organizing my thoughts and maybe sparking new ideas or perspectives to discuss in class. That said, it’s already two weeks into the semester as I write this first post. We’ll see how it goes!