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Latest explainers
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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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What is thermal energy storage? The battery that stores heat instead of electricity
Battery storage gets most of the attention, but many energy problems do not actually require electricity to be stored as electricity. If the final job is heating a building, cooling a supermarket, supplying industrial heat, or keeping a district-heating network warm, it may be simpler to store the thermal energy itself. Thermal energy storage can be as basic as a tank of hot water—or as exotic as molten salt, underground reservoirs, ice, phase-change materials, and reversible chemical reactions.
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What was the War of Currents? The fight that decided how the world would be electrified
In the 1880s, electricity had a problem: nobody had agreed what an electricity system should actually look like. Thomas Edison backed direct current. George Westinghouse built around alternating current. Nikola Tesla helped make AC dramatically more useful. The resulting War of Currents involved transformers, patents, business rivalry, public electrocutions, safety fears, and some fairly ugly propaganda. AC eventually became the backbone of the grid—but DC never actually disappeared.
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What is a spark spread? The number that decides whether a gas plant wants to run
A gas-fired power plant can be technically available, connected to the grid, fully fueled—and still have no economic reason to generate electricity. The spark spread explains why. It compares the value of the electricity a gas plant can sell with the cost of the gas it must burn to produce it. Add carbon costs and you get the clean spark spread: one deceptively simple number connecting electricity, gas, plant efficiency, carbon markets, dispatch, and power prices.
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What is reactive power? The electricity that does no work but somehow keeps everything working
Some electrical power turns motors, heats ovens, lights buildings, and charges batteries. Reactive power does none of those things directly. Instead, it moves back and forth through an AC system, sustaining the electric and magnetic fields that motors and transformers need and helping keep grid voltage where it belongs. It sounds suspiciously like useless electricity. It isn’t.
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What is methane leakage? When natural gas escapes before anyone burns it
Natural gas is mostly methane. Burn it, and the main climate problem is CO₂. Let it escape before combustion, and you release methane itself—a greenhouse gas far more powerful over the near term. That means a leaking valve, an open vent, a badly performing flare, or an abandoned well can change the climate footprint of gas before the fuel has produced a single useful kilowatt-hour.
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What are ancillary services? The grid services nobody notices until something goes wrong
Buying enough electricity is not enough to run an electricity system. The grid also needs resources that can react in seconds, hold frequency, support voltage, replace a generator that suddenly disappears, and even help restart the system after a blackout. Those invisible jobs are called ancillary services—and as power systems add batteries, renewables, demand response, and power electronics, they are becoming much more visible.
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