Energy

This section is about energy: making it, storing it, and using less of it. It starts with the house and ends with the grid.

The house comes first. Solar panels, a home battery, and the tariff that sets what a unit of electricity costs. A unit is a kilowatt hour (kWh), which is how electricity is sold. Smart meters, time-of-use pricing, and moving the big loads into the cheap hours.

The kit is next. What a rack of servers actually draws, measured at the plug rather than read off a label. Power supply efficiency, idle draw, CPU power states, and capping a machine so it stays inside a budget.

Cars and heating belong here too. EV charging, heat pumps and air conditioning, and scheduling all three around a cheap-rate window.

Then the wider picture. Where the electricity comes from, what data centres take from the grid, and who pays for the standing charge.

The Grid We Did Fix

Great Britain halved the carbon intensity of its electricity in fourteen years, ran a full year without coal, and made wind its largest single source. Meanwhile demand fell for two decades while the country plugged in 1.8 million electric vehicles. This is what the numbers show, including the bits that spoil the story.

Rejected Energy: What the Livermore Chart Actually Shows

Lawrence Livermore publishes a Sankey diagram every year showing where American energy goes. In 2024, 62.27 of 94.61 quads did no useful work at all. What rejected energy means and what a quad is, why the chart’s own method makes renewables shrink the waste rather than add to it, why transport alone is more than a third of the national total, and the three things that would actually fix it.