Battling Entropy
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Battling Entropy

Energy and the unbounded future.

“Civilisation is a local rebellion against the universe.”

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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.

February 1, 2026

Latest Analysis

Two-panel political cartoon contrasting energy costs: left shows a man facing a meter labeled "Energy Price Today" with a dial pointing to "LOW". Next to it a huge cabinet has a note "you don't want to open this"; right reveals a massive steampunk gauge wrapped in a massive copper serpent reading "RAB: 40 Years" and "Total Cost: $ Billions," symbolizing hidden long-term infrastructure and network costs.

The Forty-Year Bill

Issue #20: Why the network slice of your electricity bill is slow to fall, quick to grow, and dangerous to ignore.

Electricity bills have two clocks: fast-moving energy prices and slow-moving network costs. Australia’s regulated network assets have nearly doubled in 20 years, and electrification risks adding more forty-year infrastructure to bills. The goal is not to stop building, but to ensure customer-owned flexibility can compete with copper before the anaconda tightens. Disclosure: I am working on a venture in this field. Details at the end.

Jun 14, 2026

Museum exhibition labeled "The Grid Museum: The Machinery of Electricity" displaying six historical periods of power systems from early sparks through the distributed age, with visitors observing panels showing evolution from rival AC/DC systems and holding companies to public power, interconnected grids, market reform, and modern distributed generation with rooftop solar and EVs.

The Machinery of Electricity

Issue 19: The machinery of our electricity system is not just the physical infrastructure but the institutions that run it

Electricity institutions are not natural facts. They are machinery built for the grid of their time. Australia moved from local electricity systems to state utilities, then to the NEM. Now rooftop solar, batteries and EVs have moved the action behind the meter. The next challenge is not more market or more regulation, but new machinery for trusted coordination at the edge. Disclosure: I am working on a venture in this field. Details at the end.

Jun 7, 2026

Grid operator frantically manages a vintage distribution switchboard as mystical energy spirits with lightning bolts emerge from homes at night, their "do not disturb" warnings tangled in chaotic power lines under a system stress gauge.

Do Not Disturb

Issue 18: The battery fleet nobody can call

Australia is building a vast home-battery fleet. Those batteries help their owners a lot. They could also be of great help to the grid (the physical system, not just the market). Using batteries to provide network flexibility rather than building more poles and wires could slow the growth of the distribution network and reduce consumer bills. But that isn't happening. The problem is not that the batteries can't do the job. It is that the grid cannot reach the right ones, on the right street, at the right time. Disclosure: I am working on a venture in this field. Details at the end.

May 31, 2026

Anthropomorphic elephants in roller derby uniforms with networked mice race around a track labeled "Trunkers vs. Chaotics," with a roaring crowd in the background—a visual metaphor for forces in grid decentralization.

Synchronised Chaos

Issue 17: The incredibly rapid decentralisation of Australia's electricity system

For more than a century electricity grids were synchronised by giant spinning machines acting in near-perfect unison. Now millions of rooftop solar systems, batteries and EVs are replacing mechanical inertia with software orchestration. Some see chaos. Battling Entropy sees the birth of a faster, smarter, synchronised grid.

May 23, 2026

V2G Back to the Grid illustration: electric vehicles with bidirectional charging capabilities shown as a "flux capacitor," demonstrating how EVs store cheap daytime solar energy and discharge to power homes and support grid stability during peak evening demand.

Why V2G needs to become boring

Issue 16: Where vehicle-to-grid is actually heading in Australia, and why

Vehicle-to-grid is no longer just about those giant EV batteries. Cheap home storage, collapsing midday power prices and smarter software are reshaping the economics. The future likely combines permanently connected home batteries with opportunistic EV flexibility, coordinated through increasingly automated energy markets.

May 17, 2026

A blindfolded surveyor with theodolite next to a master planning map showing topographic terrain divided into overly simplified zones labeled Hilly, Bumpy, Trees, and Flat, illustrating how regional electricity pricing over-simplifies local differences across the grid.

Why Australia needs locational pricing

Issue 15: Australia's electricity market needs better price signals that reflect local conditions

Australia’s electricity prices ignore location, even though the grid doesn’t. This mismatch drives congestion, curtailment, and inefficient investment. There is a better system used in much of the world. Locational marginal pricing aligns prices with physics, improving coordination of batteries, generation, and demand. It adds complexity, but the cost of today’s overly simple price signals is rising as the system becomes more distributed and constrained.

May 10, 2026

A vise clamps down on an electrical transmission tower, squeezing distributed rooftop solar on the left against concentrated AI factory demand on the right, visualizing grid strain from competing generation and load.

Here comes the AI...

Issue 14: Why Australia needs data centres — and why they must become a core part of the electricity system

After twenty years of flat demand, AI data centres are bringing massive load growth back to Australia's electricity grid. The question is not whether we can handle it, but whether we're smart enough to shape it.

May 2, 2026

Cartoon kangaroo wearing a home battery pack labeled "25 kWh" runs past a struggling figure holding an "EIA-860" clipboard, toward an enormous industrial grid battery truck labeled "100 MWh" with transmission towers looming behind.

Australia is winning the battery race. Now what?

Issue 13: Australia's grid batteries are starting to matter, but the real future could be right under our noses.

Why the headline numbers flatter us, what “enough storage” actually means, and why the next move is sitting in two million garages.

Apr 27, 2026

Old West town with factory smokestacks adjacent to a procession of covered wagons retrofitted with orange solar panels and modern cars, illustrating distributed energy resources replacing centralized fossil fuel infrastructure.

Grid stability has some important new tools

Issue 12: Distributed energy resources increasingly keep the system stable. Time they were better recognised.

In California, the physical system that keeps the grid running has already changed. The market is still catching up. A new proposal to give distributed energy resources clearer pathways into the system is an important part of that.

Apr 20, 2026

Split illustration contrasting energy abundance and scarcity: left panel shows a sun-bright town square with people freely distributing energy, signs reading "free energy" and "take it please"; right panel depicts the same square in darkness with "energy shortage" signs and people hoarding resources, visualizing the duck curve and grid storage inequality.

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

Steampunk stage scene with dancing elephants in tutus, mechanical robots, classical instruments, and industrial grid infrastructure lit by spotlights, visualizing the transition from traditional generators to power electronics in grid frequency control.

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

Dual-lane highway under construction with heavy machinery and workers on both shoulders, symbolizing large-scale infrastructure buildout, while a single car drives down the empty road ahead.

The grid squeeze: 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

Long queue of electric vehicles waiting at a roadside charging station marked "Fast(ish) Charging Here" beneath transmission towers, while a sign warns "Connection Pending Due 2030"—illustrating Australia's grid connection delays blocking EV charging infrastructure rollout.

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

Surreal grinning Nikola Tesla figure conjures lightning bolts over a cityscape, powering a central transmission tower surrounded by parked electric vehicles, symbolizing wireless charging and grid dependency of autonomous EV fleets.

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

Political leaders control giant valves on an oil pipeline above a beach, while civilians below enjoy leisure activities oblivious to the infrastructure controlling their energy supply.

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

Ringmaster conducts performing elephants in a circus tent with a sign reading "shows continuously," metaphorically representing baseload power generation and grid stability as a choreographed act.

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

Workers manage tangled power cables flowing from a glowing central pot toward distributed energy resources including homes, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and an AI operator, illustrating grid management through market mechanisms rather than infrastructure expansion.

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

Anthropomorphic panda assembling glowing orange home batteries on a factory conveyor line, with EV powertrains and industrial machinery in a steampunk manufacturing facility.

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

A massive wave crests over a coal power plant on a rocky coast, with solar panels and an orange volatility graph emerging from the turbulent water, symbolizing renewable energy overwhelming legacy grid infrastructure.

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

Worker installing solar panels and grid connection on a warm-lit home surrounded by crumbling cityscape, symbolizing localized energy resilience against systemic collapse.

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

Newspaper clipping from The Australian: a Commentary piece by Tony Ferguson headlined 'Nuclear power could destabilise the market'.

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

Nuclear power plant with cooling towers and control room operators monitoring gauges, symbolizing the infrastructure and technical complexity behind grid-scale nuclear generation.

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

Global temperature heatmap showing extreme heat across continents, illustrating record-breaking temperatures with Australia the hottest of all.

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

Elon Musk in business suit stands against a large rust-red planet, symbolizing ambition and the quest to reach Mars.

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 in a spacesuit, sitting in a motorised wheelchair in space. Behind him a planet explodes. Symbolising planetary danger.

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

World map showing global horizontal irradiation with equatorial and southern regions highlighted in deep orange indicating 2700+ kWh/m² annual solar potential, demonstrating Australia's exceptional solar resource advantage.

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

Cartoon figure resembling Pauline Hanson holding a steampunk machine over her head, obscuring her view. Behind her, the earth explodes while she says "It looks just fine to me!" — visual metaphor for denial of energy system collapse.

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

Hand truck carrying a boxy crate labeled with Australian flag and symbols, representing exports and global trade.

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

Group of masked activists bearing a coffin labelled "PRIVACY". Symbolically representing "PRIVACY IS DEAD" and referencing surveillance and data protection concerns.

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

Surreal black-and-white landscape with an orange magnifying glass revealing mathematical equations, symbolizing the examination of entropy and disorder in energy systems.

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

Background reading · The Primer

View all primers →
Medieval cathedral scene where robed "grid priests" hold sacred texts. A bystander holds a golden key labeled "Primer #00," which translates the priest's strange symbols into ordinary words - poles & wires, battery, street feeder, bill, and grid rules, satirizing the mystique of electrical grid terminology.

Electrical Jargon Demystified

Primer #00: The strange terminology of electricity and grids explained in plain English

Electricity discussions are full of jargon. Some of it is necessary. Much of it is inherited from engineering, regulation and market design traditions that evolved separately over decades. The result is that ordinary discussions about electricity can quickly become unreadable. This primer is intended as a plain-English guide to some of the most common terms used in modern electricity discussions, particularly in Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM). It is not exhaustive. It is a working glossary.

Mar 3, 2026

Circus ringmaster juggling energy market chaos: strongman labeled "Battery Power" lifts weights marked with negative prices and volatility, while wind and solar performers balance on platforms, regional conductors (NSW, VIC, QLD, SA, TAS) juggle contracts, and AEMO ringmaster waves signs reading "$15,000/MWh negative prices volatility.

The NEM 101

Primer #01: Australia's National Electricity Market

Australia's National Electricity Market (NEM) — What is it, how does it work, who are the players and what do they do?

Apr 15, 2026

Underground pump turbine labeled Florence with workers excavating around it beneath mountains, representing Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro energy storage infrastructure.

Snowy 2.0 (warts and all)

Primer #02: Australia's pumped-hydro long-term storage project

Snowy 2.0 is a 2,200 MW pumped hydro project under construction in NSW, storing 350 GWh — over 30 times the entire NEM grid-battery fleet. It has been a lot slower and more expensive than planned. It is the key critical path item for the renewable transition, was originally planned for completion in 2021 and is now due late 2028. Cost has gone from $2 billion (2017) to $12 billion-plus, with all-in lifecycle estimates near $42 billion.

Apr 25, 2026

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