Energy is complex.
I make it click.
Latest explainers
-
What is power factor? The factory that ordered more electricity than it used
A factory runs on 100 kW, yet its electrical equipment demands 125 kVA. Who invited the extra 25? Meet power factor, the misunderstood relationship between useful power, reactive power, and the current your cables must carry. With calculations, capacitor-bank drama, and a skeptical finance director, we explain when correction helps and when it can backfire.
-
What are the different types of PPAs? Why the usual list gets them wrong
On-site, off-site, sleeved, virtual, corporate, pay-as-produced—PPA terminology can sound like someone emptied an energy conference into a blender. The trick is that these aren’t always competing types. They often describe different layers of the same Power Purchase Agreement. Here’s how to decode them without needing a lawyer, trader, and aspirin.
-
What is solar inverter clipping? The sun has been put on hold
At noon, the panels are ready to give everything. The inverter politely declines. Discover why solar developers deliberately install more DC panel capacity than their AC inverters can deliver, how clipping losses are calculated, and why a system that wastes some peak-hour potential can still produce more valuable electricity over the year.
-
What is an EV charging curve? Your car has opinions about 350 kW
A 350 kW charging station looks impressive until your EV asks for 60 kW and takes its sweet time. Discover what a charging curve really measures, why batteries taper, and how to calculate a realistic 10% to 80% stop. With worked examples, road-trip math, and a few very opinionated kilowatts.
-
What is a thermal bridge? Your balcony has been heating the street
Your building may have excellent insulation and still leak heat through concrete balconies, steel studs, and awkward junctions. Those shortcuts are thermal bridges. Follow one balcony from a chilly living-room corner to a real heating bill, with clear calculations for U-values, psi-values, moisture risk, and the fixes that actually work. Your balcony has been moonlighting as a radiator.
-
What is a heat rate? The power plant’s appetite has a price tag
A power plant can produce 100 MW and still have a terrible fuel bill. Heat rate reveals how much fuel energy each megawatt-hour consumes. Follow the numbers through efficiency, gross versus net output, HHV versus LHV, part-load operation, startup fuel, carbon costs, and the dispatch decisions that make gas plants profitable or painful.
-
What is a renewable energy auction? The lowest bid has to build a power plant
A renewable energy auction rewards developers who promise to build clean power at competitive prices. But a winning bid is not a finished power plant, and a strike price is not necessarily a subsidy. Follow a fictional solar auction through bid ranking, two-way CfD payments, financing, construction risk, and the fine print that separates cheap promises from reliable projects.
-
What is underground gas storage? Winter’s warehouse has a pressure gauge
Natural gas can spend the summer underground and emerge just when winter demand surges. But a storage facility is not simply a giant tank. Pressure, cushion gas, withdrawal rates, geology, and market rules decide how much help it can actually provide. Here is how the underground warehouse works, with numbers that expose its most important limitations.
-
What is the missing money problem? The power plant that can’t live on applause
The grid needs backup capacity for the nights when everything goes wrong. But a power plant that rarely runs can spend most of the year earning almost nothing. Who pays for its readiness? The missing money problem explains why electricity markets sometimes struggle to reward reliability, and why the proposed cures come with bills of their own.
-
What is a marginal emissions factor? The grid’s carbon receipt has two totals
Your power grid has two carbon receipts. One tells you the average emissions from all electricity generated. The other asks what changes when you switch on one more machine. Those totals can disagree spectacularly. Follow a late dinner order, a solar-soaked afternoon, and a battery with an inconvenient appetite to see why timing changes the carbon math.
-
What is the N-1 criterion? The grid’s dress rehearsal for disaster
At 3:06 p.m., a transmission line disappears. No storm, no sparks, just an engineer clicking a button in a computer model. The grid survives, but another line starts carrying more than it should. Welcome to N-1 planning, the art of rehearsing a failure before the real one gets a chance to ruin everyone’s afternoon.
-
What is a load duration curve? The power grid fires its calendar
An electricity system can spend thousands of hours behaving nicely and a handful demanding everything at once. A load duration curve sorts those hours by demand, exposing the costly peak, the energy underneath, and the capacity that barely gets used. But it forgets when anything happened, which is why batteries eventually insist on rehiring the calendar.
Need more than an explainer?
Need energy explained to your audience?
I write content
for energy
companies.
White papers & reports
Blog & editorial content
Newsletter ghostwriting
Investor & pitch materials
Dive into a topic
Energy basics
Renewable energy
Energy markets
Sustainability
History of energy
Transportation
Who’s behind 1000whats?
