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Latest explainers
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What is exergy? Why some joules travel first class
One kilowatt-hour of electricity can run a motor. One kilowatt-hour of lukewarm heat might struggle to run a convincing argument. Both contain the same energy, but not the same ability to do useful work. Meet exergy, thermodynamics’ brutally honest exchange rate, and discover why heat pumps, power plants, and factories should stop treating every joule like a first-class passenger.
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What is the rebound effect? When energy efficiency gets a raise and goes shopping
A delivery company doubles its fuel efficiency, celebrates the savings, and then starts driving so much that the fuel bill refuses to shrink. Welcome to the rebound effect, where cheaper energy services can tempt us to use more of them. From Jevons and steam engines to LEDs, heating, and AI, here’s why efficiency works, why savings sometimes wander off, and how to bring them home.
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What is an SPV in renewable energy projects? The tiny company behind a giant power plant
A renewable energy SPV can own an enormous power plant while having fewer employees than your neighborhood bakery. How does that work? And why are banks strangely enthusiastic about it? Let’s follow the equipment, the contracts, and—most importantly—the money.
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What is a steam turbine? The machine that doesn’t care where the heat came from
Coal plants burn fuel. Nuclear reactors split atoms. Geothermal plants extract heat from underground. Yet many of them rely on the same machine to produce electricity: a steam turbine. Discover how expanding steam turns heat into mechanical power, why condensers matter almost as much as turbines, and how one remarkably adaptable technology became central to modern electricity generation.
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What is a synchronous condenser? The generator that stopped generating
Imagine installing an enormous rotating electrical machine, connecting it to the power grid, and deliberately producing almost no electricity. That is a synchronous condenser. It provides inertia, voltage support and short-circuit strength without burning fuel to generate power. As traditional power stations retire, this old technology is finding a surprisingly important new job.
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What is capture price? Why your solar farm does not earn the average electricity price
A power market may average €80/MWh over a year while a solar plant earns only €60/MWh. Nothing is missing. The problem is timing. Capture price measures the average electricity price a generator actually experiences during the hours when it produces – and explains why two power plants selling into the same market can earn very different prices for the same MWh.
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What is vehicle-to-grid? When your electric car becomes part of the power system
Most electric cars spend most of their lives parked with a large battery doing absolutely nothing. Vehicle-to-grid technology asks a slightly provocative question: if that battery can charge from the grid, why can’t it occasionally send electricity back? V2G turns parked EVs from passive loads into flexible energy resources that can charge when electricity is abundant and discharge when the power system needs help.
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What is electricity balancing? The grid has to get one number right every second
Electricity has one unforgiving rule: generation and consumption must remain in balance in real time. But forecasts are never perfect, power plants trip, demand changes and wind does not read tomorrow’s schedule. Electricity balancing is how the power system continuously closes the gap between what was planned and what actually happens.
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What is industrial heat? The giant energy problem hiding inside factories
Factories do not just need electricity. They need enormous amounts of heat—to dry paper, pasteurize milk, make steam, melt metals, crack chemicals, fire glass and turn limestone into cement. Industrial heat is one of the biggest and least visible parts of the energy system, and decarbonizing it gets harder as the thermometer climbs.
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What are negative electricity prices? When power producers pay you to take their electricity
Electricity is supposed to cost money. Yet wholesale power prices can fall below zero, meaning generators may effectively pay the market to take their electricity. That is not a broken market or free electricity for your house. It is a very loud price signal telling the power system: we have more electricity right now than we know what to do with.
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What is energy? The most important thing in physics that nobody can point to
Energy powers stars, batteries, bodies, power grids, and basically everything that changes. But ask physics what energy actually is, and the answer gets strange fast. Energy is not a substance, not a force, and not simply “the ability to do work.” It is something deeper: a measurable property of physical systems, a conserved quantity tied to the structure of time itself—and, at the frontiers of physics, a concept whose full meaning is still surprisingly unsettled.
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What is an electrolyzer? The machine that turns electricity into hydrogen
An electrolyzer takes electricity, water, and some very deliberate electrochemistry and produces hydrogen and oxygen. That sounds simple enough. The interesting part begins when the machine becomes hundreds of megawatts large, starts following wind and solar production, competes for cheap electricity, needs purified water and compression, and discovers that making hydrogen cheaply is mostly an electricity problem wearing a chemistry badge.
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