How to greatly improve the electrical grid

Undecided with Matt Ferrell: The National Grid Is Dead. Here’s What Replaces It.

In April 2025, most of Spain and Portugal went dark. A cascading failure knocked out the Iberian peninsula’s grid in seconds. Just four years earlier, Texas came within 4 minutes and 37 seconds of its own total collapse. Not a temporary blackout. A full shutdown. What engineers call a “black start,” a process that could take days to weeks to recover from. Not to mention all of the people that died as a result. According to the Department of Energy, 70 percent of US transmission lines are over 25 years old. We’re running 21st century lives on a mid-20th century grid. But back in 1997, energy consultant Karl Rábago wrote a blueprint for a radically different grid. His model? The internet. Seriously. And no, I’m not talking about today’s internet, which is just five billionaires in a trench coat. I’m talking about the ‘90s internet. Decentralized. Collaborative. And really, really cool. So how would the internet stop a blackout? And why did the guy who figured it out get ignored for 30 years? But first, we need to understand what went so wrong.

Are you team DER [Distributed Energy Resources] or team “leave things as they are”?

The virtual utility is the “Internetification” of electrical supply. It has numerous benefits, and of course will be fought by the current centralized utilities, just like big oil is fighting renewables.

QuickTime, Book, Sculley, develop Magazine

Daring Fireball: John Buck on the Invention of QuickTime

Fun anecdote from 1990:

He asked Peppel to create a product plan that he could announce at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on May 7th. That day, Casey took to the stage and announced QuickTime to a stunned audience, saying, “Apple intends to develop real-time software compression/decompression technology that will run on today’s modular Macintosh systems. A system-wide time coding to allow synchronization of sound, animation, and other time-critical processes.”

Casey explained that Apple’s new multimedia architecture would be delivered by the end of the year. He did not say that QuickTime had no budget, staff, or offices.

WORTHINGTON: We were dumbfounded.

KONSTANTIN OTHMER, QUICKDRAW ENGINEER: I was standing next to Bruce Leak, and asked him, “What the heck was that?” He said he had no idea.

QuickTime actually shipped by WWDC 1991, …

John Scully was the CEO of Apple at the time. Although he was much maligned by Steve Jobs and others for some of his decisions, he did have a positive lasting impact on Apple.

This also reminded me of the wonderful Kon & Bal column in Apple Develop around that time.

New conservation sites, new funding model?

CBC: Carney announces $3.8B to protect nature, new conservation sites in James Bay and Manitoba

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced $3.8 billion in funding to protect nature on Tuesday, as the federal government moves to meet its conservation targets.

In addition to public money, the government is seeking private sector investment to fund the conservation strategy, which will involve the creation of new national parks and marine reserves.

“Creating these spaces is ambitious and requires significant funding,” Carney said during a news conference in Wakefield, Que. “We can’t do it with public money alone.”

“Private sector investment” Hmmm. Voluntary taxes? A new federal “pay what you can” strategy? The new “ScotiaBank Nature Reserve”?

Today I was thinking about Will Shipley. He hasn’t posted anything about software in quite a while (since he joined Apple five years ago). I wonder what he thinks of useability in current Apple operating systems? (I wonder if he could say?)

The Ultimate Short Term Greed (US Politics)

NYT: Trump Repeals Key Greenhouse Gas Finding, Erasing EPA’s Power to Fight Climate Change

President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.

The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.

Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.

This is beyond moronic. If there is evil in this world, it is embodied by Trump and his acolytes.