Climate, Grids, Balance Sheets

Neel Somani wrote the primer on US power in the age of AI; that seat is taken. The open seat is the researcher who traces climate physics through under-covered grids into equity prices, with complexity economics as the method. Four markets, chosen for their coverage gaps in English and their distinct climate drivers: Lithuania (wind, and a once-in-history topology change), Brazil (water, and a spot price that is literally the output of a government model), and New York and California (heat and sea, where the equity expressions actually trade). Each regional lane produces a physical state variable; a fourth lane turns those state variables into Armstrong signals.

“Weather is random; who pays for weather is a convention.”

The SFI winter school’s focal application is inequality, and the established lane there is valuation conventions as distributive institutions. The climate lanes are not a separate program — they are the same claim at a new empirical site. A drought or a wind lull does not distribute its own costs; the market design does, and every link is a convention someone chose: the uniform clearing price, the tariff flag, the CVaR parameter, the zonal boundary. Where the valuation lane studies analyst price targets distributing wealth, this bridge studies grid pricing rules distributing drought. The join is always the same three-step chain: physical state variable → pricing convention → household incidence.