Energy and the unbounded future.
“Civilisation is a local rebellion against the universe.”
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
Issue #22: Why the next phase of energy democracy is storage, not solar
Australia's rooftop-solar revolution reached homeowners and stopped at the gutter — renters, apartments and low-income households were locked out. Free midday power is coming, but it's only democratic if you can store it for the evening. The next equity frontier isn't solar; it's storage: plug-in batteries, real community storage, and a universal storage credit.
Jun 30, 2026
Issue #21: Breaking the real-time constraint that has governed the electricity grid since its invention, and why claiming the prize turns out to be a coordination problem.
Storage at every demand point dissolves electricity's age-old real-time constraint, and marginal energy becomes cheap. But cheap energy is not enough to make cheap bills: the wires that deliver it are now the dominant cost, and spent unwisely they squeeze us for decades. The prize becomes working the existing wires far harder. Yet a single blunt signal like "free power" at noon synchronises demand rather than spreading it, rebuilding the peak from the import side. Time stops being the limit; coordination needs to take its place, feeder by feeder. Disclosure: I am working on a venture in this field. Details at the end.
Jun 21, 2026
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Issue 07: Nikola's ghost, Elon's taxis, and the grid-entangled economics of autonomous EV fleets
Tesla's FCC-approved wireless Cybercab charging lets robotaxis arbitrage ERCOT's volatile nodal prices — turning idle charging into a grid asset.
Mar 13, 2026
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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