The Grid

German research team proved in 2011 that a careful study of the micropatterns of electricity use made newly observable by digital meters can reveal what appliances you have running and even what television program you are watching—as long as the program is being broadcast on scheduled TV, as signatures can be compared only with known possible outpu

Love Canal in 1978 in tiny Niagara Falls changed pollution from an abstract evil to an immediate horror show.

Even though few realized the implications at the time, section 210 of the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA for short) effectively broke the utility’s total control over everything that entered, moved through, and exited their power system.

This turn toward conservation and energy efficiency was the first crisis, of three, that would shock the electric utilities during the Carter era. Their business model, long premised on endlessly increasing consumption linked to endlessly increasing production of ever cheaper electric power tied, in turn, to the construction of ever bigger, more te

“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search … a little theory and a little calculation would have saved him 90 percent of his labor.”

Though we tend to give Thomas Alva Edison the credit for having invented the lightbulb (he did not), he did devise something just as remarkable—the parallel circuit,