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Latest explainers
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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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What is waste heat? The energy we already paid for and then threw away
Factories, power plants, engines, data centers, furnaces, compressors, and even supermarket refrigerators constantly reject heat into the environment. Some of that loss is unavoidable. Some is simply energy leaving the system before we found another useful job for it. Waste heat recovery asks an almost embarrassingly sensible question: if we already paid to create that energy, can we use it again before letting it escape?
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What is energy arbitrage? Buying electricity when nobody wants it
Electricity can be worth €20/MWh at noon and €150/MWh a few hours later. Energy arbitrage turns that difference into a business model: buy or store electricity when it is cheap, then sell it when it becomes valuable. The idea sounds suspiciously like “buy low, sell high.” It is. The interesting part is what batteries, efficiency losses, degradation, forecasts, negative prices, and thousands of competing batteries do to that beautifully simple plan.
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What is black start? How do you restart a grid with no electricity?
A blackout creates a wonderfully circular problem: the grid needs power plants to restart, but many power plants need electricity from the grid before they can start. Black start is how operators break that loop—using specially capable resources to create the first energized islands, start larger generators, reconnect transmission lines and loads, synchronize those islands, and gradually rebuild an entire power system from darkness.
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