electricity
How to bring down Britain’s power grid
At the end of last month, a fire at an electrical substation in Maida Vale caused chaos in west London.…
How Ed Miliband plans to conjure electricity out of nothing
Electricity is magical stuff. From a couple of tiny holes in a wall comes an apparently endless supply of invisible,…
How to stop a blackout
Will the lights go out this winter? A letter from the energy regulator Ofgem reveals just how seriously it is taking…
The electrifying genius of Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla, the man who made alternating current work, wrote to J. Pierpont Morgan, the industrialist and banker. It was…
A brown coal plan that’s worse than Finkel?
The Victorian Government’s new Statement on Future Uses of Brown Coal, released earlier this month, is further proof that there…
Gender fluid
Benjamin Franklin thought that an excess of electric fluid gave rise to positive electricity, and a deficiency of the fluid…
Putting the sun in the shade
About a century ago, scientists started meddling with an unfamiliar force of nature and the rest of us were terrified.…
An electrifying politician
Just who was Benjamin Franklin? Apart, that is, from journalist, statesman, diplomat, founding father of the United States, inventor of…
Cooler heads
The age of climate realism is upon us
Fracking Lancashire
That democracy is a superior form of government to any other goes without saying. But in order to function, it…
The parlour-game approach
A group of retired Somerset farmers were sitting about in the early 1960s, so Ian Mortimer’s story goes, debating which…
Let them eat carbon credits
How green policies hit the poorest hardest
Nuclear fallout
Britain is about to buy the world’s most expensive power station
The real energy scandal
Politicians, not the Big Six, have jacked up the price of power. And they’re only just getting started
