Quarterly Battery (discharging) Energy high record for NEM (1,038.8 GWh) — up 32.9% from previous record

Literally me on holiday the other week:

Huh

"this drone flies fast and autonomously scouts a large area to, uhhhhh, locate and assist hikers" - as seen on many student projects, turns out it's not quite *always* disingenuous bullshit

Aus energy Christmas! AEMO's 2026 ISP releases today, our national energy plan for the future. Important to remember: • This is a plan, not a prediction. It won't happen without the right incentives. • Govt policy wishes are input constraints, regardless of likelihood www.aemo.com.au/-/media/file...

Great piece here from Os, making a strong argument that public fears of multiculturalism are effectively a misdiagnosis of the root causes behind a broader collapse of societal institutions and participatory democracy.

High-culture Viennese fashion

Really interesting argument here that the US's climate nihilism follows a shift in capital's political influence from finance to tech. That's a uniquely US-specific phenomenon, and goes some way to explaining why the UK or Australia don't seem to be following the US's path.

Because the thing is, you can't have normal democratic politics except without climate policy. A major push to decarbonize is where any rational, minimally accountable government is going to land in the 21st century. If that's not where you want to end up, then you need a different kind of politics.

An idea I've been playing with for a while is that one of the core elements of the political economy of Trumpism is that a critical mass of the US capitalist class decided that decarbonization was not worth the costs to them.

Really cool story, and something I expect to see more of as we move deeper into green ecological engineering. Two questions come to mind: • PV needs semi-regular cleaning. How tricky does that become? • What do near-ground temps look like? Plant matter has got to have a higher albedo than PV…

I'm in Slovenia for a few days of walking, and staying next to a small church with a remarkably extended 7am wakeup bellringing session. Works for me! But from the 1.7 star rating on google, seems not everyone's a fan

The computer lost the mandate of heaven when the humble, helpful "program" was replaced with the insidious "app"

This will change with the next round of coal retirements, but it's still a big deal: in two years the Australian battery fleet has gone from barely relevant to shaping more energy than our peaking gas. Gas has now effectively been marginalised into an irregular seasonal peaking role.

I think one of the important points about the budget is that the right-wing papers are losing their minds, but all the polling shows that nobody who wasn't already a nailed-on Lib cares and the reason the Labor vote has fallen slightly is because inflation is back and interest rates are up

What a world where ABC Arts is publishing articles grounded in vintage 4chan posts: www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05...

the "Thucydides Trap" shows how bad history can succeed if it serves a purpose

I was interviewed in the SMH today alongside some other legends about gig guides

Jon Hilty still makes and shoots these. petapixel.com/2024/05/06/m... He offers instructions on how to make your own too. www.jonhilty.com/autochromegu...

Excellent news: gas use on Australia's biggest power grid hit a 25 year low in Q1 2026, largely thanks to batteries shifting solar from the middle of the day to the crucial evening peak. Real world emissions cuts. Actual good news. You are allowed to enjoy it. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04...

On my mind this week: do we have a realistic sense of the risks in RE investment? Here in Aus, new REs aren't really clearing hurdle rates. We talk costs vs revenue; govt talks "derisking" as almost a value-neutral market fix - but there's a lot of real risk at play. What *should* fair returns be?

Efficiency is fine, but most of us also need novelty and a bit of unpredictability to bother engaging. Overoptimisation robs us of that.

Data centres quickly emerging as a focal point of backlash across a range of issues - anti-tech, anti-electricity, anti-inequality, anger at local politics' failure to follow or form democratic sentiment.

Andrew Cockburn on Mossad’s kill list - read it here: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Krugman on oil demand elasticity and proper price outcomes: open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug... Now thinking on how to treat producers withdrawing traded supply to prioritise domestic demand. Is that effectively a high-WtP inelastic demand signal, or something different and distinctly nonlinear?

that said, a little concerned by the though of what lived experience of covid hoarding (hoarders get what they want, rule-abiders do without) might mean for attempts at public-good fuel rationing. It'd be nice to see a *little* tarring and feathering of social defectors for once, as a treat.

Very boring address from the PM, but would still be good to have these more regularly IMO - anodyne and non-combative is a broadly reassuring combo from any politician under current circumstances

Beautiful stuff

The public messaging around this still seems totally unable of grasping that tradeoffs must be made and people *will* suffer. 10% less oil supply doesn't mean "prices rise a bit" - it means prices rise until people can no longer afford 10% of former consumption. There's no way around this!

Some of you will hate to hear this, but Donald Trump has done more for public transit this year than any President in my lifetime.

In 1991 the US had a reason to fight. In 2003 it manufactured one. In 2026 it didn’t even bother. Tracing the decay of the unipolar order via three Gulf conflicts. new post

Two parallel drivers: • Oil crisis = incentive to electrify transport. Investment in EVs will permanently reduce oil demand. • LNG crisis = incentive to use less LNG for power. Renewables work, but so does coal! Are we about to see more states adopt China-style policies supporting coal *and* EVs?

With Gulf refineries being hit that could take years to repair, electrification of transport is the only way through this oil shock - there simply won't be enough liquid fuels to meet pre-war demand. Similarly for renewable generation to places currently importing LNG to feed turbines.

Nobody has ever been so lyrically yet thoroughly excoriated as in this piece. And yet, few people have ever deserved such a complete dismantling as the Prince formerly known as Andrew www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Two months late, but recommend this striking read on politics and industry in a (relatively successful!) post-industrial town. Some quite uncomfortable truths here on the constraints of c21st green industry deployments against a backdrop of diminished state capacity and stagnant local capital

I've been working on this for ages in various countries: the story of the intelligence buildup to Putin's 2022 invasion. How did the US and Britain find out so much, and why were Europe and Ukraine sceptical. It's a long one: www.theguardian.com/world/ng-int...

Following a seven month outage after blowing an LP turbine last August, Yallourn 2 came back online yesterday. Seems like a lot of effort for a unit that's meant to retire in mid '28 wattclarity.com.au/market-opera...

Sad to say of what used to be a beloved public institution, but the ABC seems unsalvageable. A week of horse-race reporting on whether sending cops to break pensioners' backs polls well, almost no mention (let alone analysis) of rights or national principles - this org is cooked. Let it die.

A column today: China and India reduced coal power last year. Is now the time Australia can tackle its big polluters by making them pay? (With some arguments in between these two issues.)

Only six months late but I really enjoyed this preso from @dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social touching on one of my favourite niche energy topics: diesel! Pipeline gas has real challenges meeting seasonal peaking needs - big tanks of liquid fuel are a great complement www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/sites/defaul...

It's pretty crazy that this book was published in 2006, and the characters suspect that the alien they are talking to in the opening is an LLM in a sense more or less recognizable to anyone reading it today.

competitive advantage for the LLM era: went insane reading Blindsight a decade ago; confronted the fact that much of what we value as intelligence can be decomposed into component submodules; accepted that sentience/consciousness was not a precondition of effectiveness wrt many cognitive tasks, etc

NSW Police playing some very stupid games tonight while suppressing protests against Chris Minns's (and Jeffrey Epstein's?) mate Isaac Herzog. Police blocked the crowd on George St from both ends then moved in behind pepper spray to squeeze it. Fortunately few panicked - could have been a real mess.