This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew.

I’ve had a run of luck ever since I left my staff scientist position at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to become a freelance consultant doing statistical modeling and forecasting, mostly related to electricity consumption and prices: just as I finished a contract, another one would fall into my lap. A lot of work came my way through my de facto partner Sam, but then my friend Clay brought me into a project, and every now and then my friend Aeneas has something that he needs for his company, and I had a couple of clients who found me through having heard about me without any personal connection.

One lesson is: even in today’s world, with LinkedIn and websites and blogs and other ways of making ourselves known to the world, personal contacts matter a lot in getting consulting work. Or at least that has been the case for me. That’s been good for me because I’ve had good contacts, but it’s not necessarily good for society. If you’re younger and don’t have a lot of work experience, and you don’t have many friends doing the same sort of work you’re doing, you won’t have the advantages I’ve had.

So, for seven years everything was great. But this year has not gone so perfectly: I’m down to two clients at the moment, and one of them only needs a little bit of work from me each month. I’m looking for work but, never having had to do it before, I don’t really know how. But one thing I know is that people use LinkedIn to look for jobs and for people to fill those jobs, so I updated my long-moribund LinkedIn profile and clicked a few buttons to indicate that I’m looking for work. Several recruiters have contacted me about specific jobs, and I’ve also been looking through the job listings, looking for either more consulting work or for a permanent job.

Three things really stand out. Here’s the TLDR version:
1. There’s a lot of demand for time series forecasting of electricity consumption and prices.
2. The modeler has to write the production code to implement the model.
3. It’s gotta be Python.

That’s pretty much it for factual content in this post, but then I have some thoughts about why one aspect of this doesn’t make much sense to me, so read on if this general topic is of interest to you.

I. Modeling and Forecasting of Electricity Supply, Demand, and Price.

There are quite a few jobs for electricity time series modeling, and for optimization based on that modeling. Some companies want to predict regional electricity demand and/or price and use this to decide when to do things like charge electric vehicles or operate water pumps or do other things that need to be done within a fairly narrow time window but not necessarily right now. And then there are other forecasting and optimization problems like whether to buy a giant battery to use when the electricity price is high, and if so how big, and how do you decide when to use it or recharge it. All of this stuff is right up my alley: I’m good at this and I have lots of relevant experience. To give an example of a job in this space, here’s something from a job description I just looked at (for a company called Geli): “Your primary responsibility will be to lead the development