About The Duck Curve

The Duck Curve covers the electric side of the energy transition: power generation beyond fossil fuels, grid-scale and home energy storage, electric vehicles, and the policy that shapes all of it. The name comes from the grid operators' most famous chart: the duck-shaped curve that daily net load traces when solar floods the middle of the day. It is the emblem of a grid in transition, and of the problems this site exists to cover.

What we publish

Three kinds of page. News: single-story posts, briefs, roundups, and longer research pieces, each filed under a topic and tagged by subject. Reference pages: maintained state-of-play pages on running stories, each with where things stand, a sourced timeline, and the next milestone to watch; they are revised as the record changes and show when they were last updated. The index is at Reference. Explainers: evergreen pages on the concepts the news assumes you know, such as the duck curve, kW versus kWh, virtual power plants, and interconnection queues; they are listed in the footer.

How we source

Every article, reference page, and explainer is built on primary sources: the filing, docket, dataset, paper, or first-party announcement where the information originated, not the coverage that echoed it. Sources are cited alongside every article, linked in the text where each claim is made. When a document can't be independently reviewed, we say so. Analysis and outlook sections extrapolate only from cited material, and say what they extrapolate from. We keep a copy of every source we cite; if a link has since gone dead, ask at contact@theduckcurve.com and we will send it.

Corrections

When we get something wrong, we fix the article and note the correction at the end of it. Reference pages are corrected by revision, with the updated date on the page. If you spot an error, tell us: email contact@theduckcurve.com or reach us at @theduckcurve.

Contact

Tips, corrections, and press inquiries: contact@theduckcurve.com.

Follow

RSS (or any topic's feed from the footer), and @theduckcurve on X. Every article is also available as plain markdown by appending .md to its URL.