Energy and the unbounded future.
“Civilisation is a local rebellion against the universe.”
01: 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
07: 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
06: 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 8, 2026
05: 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
04: 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 23, 2026
03: 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 17, 2026
02: Something changed this week in Australian energy markets. Not an individual event but a pattern. This is what inevitability looks like.
Feb 14, 2026
01: 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
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
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
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
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
FROM THE ORIGINAL 2016/17 SITE: Stephen Hawking says the world faces a particularly threatening time
Dec 3, 2016
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
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
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
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
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
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