“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” — Mr Micawber, Charles Dickens On the front pages of newspapers, electricity grids are often talked about as if they were bank accounts. …

Are electricity grids like the Internet? Not enough — Historically, a great deal of growth has come from advances in one area being picked up and expanded on in another. Over the past 30 years, the Internet has made huge progress, and it makes sense to look at whether some of those advances could be copied on electricity grids. …

In our last post, we talked about how the American multinational technology company Google was using data and predictions about green power availability on local grids to help them move to 24/7 carbon-free operations. Google reckons sustainability requires “access to transparent, granular, high-quality energy data.” What kind of data are…

Greening the Grid — It’s All About Data FlatPeak was started in 2021. We are part of the world’s ongoing effort to make electricity grids green. FlatPeak’s focus is on providing timely, good quality energy data directly to high-power appliances like EV chargers, thermostats, washing machines and tumble dryers, via open APIs. The FlatPeak open, standardised application programming…

The grid, the internet, and the cloud could learn more together — Arguably, the American multinational technology company, Google, has the most ambitious industrial sustainability target in the world. It has committed to moving its entire business, including its global computing cloud network, to 24/7 Carbon Free Electricity (24/7 CFE) by 2030. We can learn from them. To achieve this goal, one…

The right information can enable smart devices on the edge of grids to make automated decisions about when and how they use energy and thus lower their carbon emissions. This is called Demand Side Response (DSR). It’s the future of energy consumption and greening the grid. Consumer appliances that draw…

If there are no robots, killer AIs, time travel or spaceships in a novel, is it even SciFi? Margaret Atwood caused controversy a few years back by claiming scifi was just “talking squids in outer space” and only speculative fiction (presumably like “Handmaid’s Tale”) was true literature. Isaac Asimov reckoned…

Bill Gates’ new book on climate change was published this month. It’s very good. People should read it. TL;DR — we need a lot of inventions to save us from having to dim the world for a decade with Krakatoa-style dust. Even a volcano would only buy us time. It’s…

Reality Doesn’t Scale — Could It? — Unfortunately, Colonel Jessup was right. You can’t handle the truth. No individual has been able to for a long time. If truth is the sum of human knowledge: facts, theories, and debate, it’s huge and growing. It’s already too large for any human to stay on top of— even Tom…