Energy
Demand flexibility: the cheapest thing nobody buys
Shifting when electricity is used costs almost nothing and displaces generation, storage and network investment. Most of it remains unexploited.
Energy
Grids, storage, solar and the physics that sets the ceiling.
Energy
Reading an energy statistic without being fooled
Capacity is not generation, generation is not energy, and percentages depend entirely on the denominator chosen.
Energy
Fusion: reading the milestones properly
Several genuine records have been set recently, and the gap between scientific breakeven and a power station is larger than the coverage suggests.
Energy
Carbon capture: the honest assessment
A necessary technology for some industrial emissions, a poor substitute for not emitting, and a category where the claims and the deployed capacity diverge sharply.
Energy
Grid inertia and why frequency matters
A power system stays up because enormous spinning masses resist change, and replacing them with electronics required rethinking how stability works.
Energy
Geothermal and the drilling problem
Firm, low-carbon, always-on power available almost everywhere in principle, and constrained by how deep you can drill economically.
Energy
Hydrogen: where it makes sense and where it does not
A genuinely useful decarbonisation tool for a specific set of applications, promoted enthusiastically for several where it is a poor fit.
Energy
Transmission is the bottleneck nobody photographs
A great deal of clean generation is built, connected late, and curtailed — because the wires to move it do not exist.
Energy
Heat pumps and the electrification of heating
A technology that delivers several units of heat per unit of electricity, and a set of practical obstacles that have very little to do with the physics.
Energy
Nuclear power and the data centre question
A technology with an unusual cost structure meeting a customer with an unusual demand profile, and a set of claims worth checking.
Energy
Solar economics: what actually changed
Module prices fell by orders of magnitude over four decades, and the interesting question is what now dominates the cost instead.
Energy
Why grid storage is the hard part
Generating clean electricity is largely solved economically. Having it available at three in the morning in February is not.