Battling Entropy

Free power at lunch and the democratisation of energy storage

Issue 11: Australia is awash with energy at noon—who gets to store it?

Victoria’s recently announced "free daytime power" plan may look like a consumer giveaway but in fact it is recognition of a market signal. It tells us that midday electricity is now so plentiful that it makes no sense to charge for it. Once that becomes explicit, the real question is not whether power should be free for three hours. It is who gets to store it.

Apr 12, 2026

Rebuilding the rhythm — learning to keep time again

Issue 10: Part 2 of "When the rhythm section fades..." on the replacement of large spinning generators with power electronics

In the last post on this topic , I observed that the grid is losing its rhythm section. For decades, large synchronous generators — coal, gas, hydro — acted like the drummer and bassist of the system. They didn’t just produce energy. They held everything together. Frequency, voltage, stability — all of it emerged from the physical behaviour of spinning machines. That rhythm is fading. This piece is about what replaces it.

Apr 4, 2026

Our Grid Is Not Full. But We Keep Building It.

Issue 09: How demand flexibility and distributed batteries could defer $100 billion in grid infrastructure

A coalition of US tech giants claims using our existing electricity networks better could save $100 billion in grid infrastructure costs. They are probably right. In Australia we are still building more networks to carry less electricity.

Mar 29, 2026

Connection Pending

Issue 08: Why Australia's EV charging rollout is stalled by 18–36 month grid connection delays

Grid connection delays of 18–36 months and costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per site are throttling fast charger deployment in Australia, particularly in the bush. EV sales are rising quickly. Infrastructure is not. The constraint is not capital. It is connection. We need a dedicated funding programme for long-distance charging infrastructure.

Mar 21, 2026

Nikola's Ghost and Elon's Taxis

Issue 07: Tesla's wireless Cybercab charging, Nikola's legacy, and the grid-entangled economics of autonomous EV fleets

Tesla's FCC approval for wireless Cybercab charging appears to echo Nikola Tesla's century-old vision. In reality autonomous taxis, wireless charging, ERCOT’s volatile nodal market and a lot of storage are about to collide. The 21st century Tesla may be the winner.

Mar 13, 2026

Give me the oil, please...

Issue 06: Australia's energy security in a world at war — oil dependence, gas exports and the renewable hedge

While Australia awakens from another blissful summer the world is at war. Our energy supplies are being severely disrupted. Battling Entropy identifies the single most effective thing we can do about it: electrify more of our transport.

Mar 6, 2026

When the rhythm section fades...

Issue 05: What happens to grid stability when synchronous generators retire and inverters take over

For a century and a half, the steady beat of our electricity system came from spinning steel. The inertia of synchronous generators held the 50Hz rhythm steady as a mechanical side-effect of rotation. That era is ending. In a grid dominated by power electronics, stability is no longer a by-product of physics. It must be specified, tested, validated and governed. A recent white paper from Australian researchers makes the challenge explicit: we are virtualising the grid without yet having a national architecture to verify its behaviour under stress. The transition that matters for the grid is not from coal to solar and wind. It is from inertia to firmware. That demands a new discipline of coordination, markets and institutional design.

Feb 27, 2026

Massachusetts uses energy markets to reduce copper build-out

Issue 04: National Grid's DER marketplace in Massachusetts tests whether markets can solve grid constraints

National Grid's new DER marketplace in Massachusetts is testing a fundamental question: can distributed energy resources solve grid bottlenecks more cheaply than traditional infrastructure—and can markets coordinate them efficiently enough to matter?

Feb 20, 2026

China's solid-state battery standard is all about V2G, not range

Issue 03: China's solid-state battery standard, BYD's 2027 production target, and the vehicle-to-grid endgame

China is standardising solid-state EV batteries with BYD starting production as soon as 2027. This is about unlocking the economics of full scale grid integration of EV batteries.

Feb 14, 2026

Australia's battery build-out has crossed the Rubicon

Issue 02: Australia's grid-scale battery pipeline crosses 12 GW as FCAS revenue collapses and arbitrage takes over

Something changed this week in Australian energy markets. Not an individual event but a pattern. This is what inevitability looks like.

Feb 8, 2026

The Battling Entropy Manifesto

Issue 01: Civilisation is a local rebellion against the universe

Entropy is relentless. Civilisation is resistance. Technology, collapsing costs, and bold imagination let us redesign energy and create islands of coherence in a chaotic world.

Feb 1, 2026

Nuclear power could destabilise the market

The federal opposition’s push for government-owned nuclear power in Australia threatens to destabilise our electricity market, undermining the sophisticated market-pricing system that has evolved since the 1990s.

Jan 16, 2025

The Federal Opposition's nuclear policy is dangerously misguided

For decades, conservative governments championed the privatisation of the energy sector, creating a real-time market that balances supply and demand across coal, gas, wind, solar, and hydro. Now the same party wants to reimpose centralised control under a re-nationalised nuclear generating sector. That would be a colossal mistake.

Jan 14, 2025

The hottest place on earth runs out of energy…

FROM THE ORIGINAL 2016/17 SITE: Take a close look at the picture above. On Saturday, Australia (and New South Wales in particular) was the hottest place on the planet. Our air conditioning systems were all running flat out...

Feb 14, 2017

Just watched Elon Musk’s audacious and inspiring Mars colonisation announcement

FROM THE ORIGINAL 2016/17 SITE: I have just finished watching Elon Musk’s latest SpaceX announcement and I’m absolutely, utterly blown away!

Jan 2, 2017

Stephen Hawking says this is the most dangerous time for our planet

FROM THE ORIGINAL 2016/17 SITE: Stephen Hawking says the world faces a particularly threatening time

Dec 3, 2016

Australian renewable energy: our unfair advantage

FROM THE ORIGINAL 2016/17 SITE: looking at the issue of renewable energy in Australia I am reminded of a great natural resource that we have in abundance. In fact we have far more of it than any other OECD country.

Nov 3, 2016

Fact-proof screens up!

FROM THE ORIGINAL 2016/17 SITE: Hanson has been rightly ridiculed for using a healthy section of the Great Barrier Reef, 1,000 kilometers south of where bleaching is occurring, to show that climate change is a fabrication.

Oct 13, 2016

Critics of free trade have got it wrong

FROM THE ORIGINAL 2016/17 SITE: Until 2016 I thought that we had debated free trade vs protectionism enough over the past couple of hundred years and reached a broad consensus that free trade created value.

Sep 3, 2016

Does anyone ever mourn the death of privacy?

FROM THE ORIGINAL 2016/17 SITE: Privacy is stone dead. Let's make sure we all understand that. It died a slow and largely unlamented death over the period 1998 to 2015. Contrary to popular opinion, it's murderer wasn't government.

Aug 19, 2016

What is entropy anyway and why would you want to battle it?

FROM THE ORIGINAL 2016/17 SITE: What does our future hold? Are we looking at world peace and human progress (with inevitable but hopefully occasional setbacks) or are we about to descend into turmoil?

Jan 1, 2016