power grid

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on the state of the US power grid, why it needs fixing, and the risks of aging infrastructure.

Practical Engineering explains what a black start is: restarting a power grid after total collapse. It shows why most plants need outside power to start and why rebuilding a synchronized grid is delicate and high-stakes.

Practical Engineering's explanation of the February 2021 Texas winter storm and the resulting power grid outage. It lays out the facts about ERCOT, the grid's isolation, and how generation across fuel types failed in the cold.

A clip from the BBC series Britain from Above showing UK peak power demand. It shows a grid engineer preparing for the surge as millions put the kettle on when a popular show ends.

Practical Engineering explains why connecting solar and other inverter-based generation to the grid is hard. It covers grid stability, load balancing and the behind-the-scenes engineering challenges of renewables.

A Just Have a Think video on the proposed 16 billion pound Xlinks project to build solar, wind and battery capacity in southern Morocco. It would send around 3.6GW to the UK by subsea HVDC cable as near-baseload power.

Chris Boden shows how an operator starts a large hydroelectric turbine generator and manually synchronizes it to the grid using a needle phase meter.

Footage of the 2007 Aurora test, in which a cyberattack was used to destroy a large generator at a test facility in Idaho.

Technology Connections explains the difference between power (watts) and energy (watt-hours) and why confusing them leads to errors. It runs about 52 minutes and uses everyday examples.

Footage of Richard Box's art installation in which fluorescent tubes light up in the ground under high voltage power lines, showing the electric fields they produce.

Practical Engineering explains pumped storage hydropower, which makes up most grid-scale electricity storage. It covers how it works and why it fits only certain geographies.

MIT's Donald Sadoway presents the liquid metal battery as a design for grid-scale stationary electricity storage, at an Imperial College London event in 2018. He covers the grid benefits of massive-scale storage.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen's WordCamp Europe 2017 talk presents CSS Grid Layout as a native two-dimensional layout system that changes how web pages are structured, including responsive layouts independent of source order. It was given as browsers began shipping support.

Tom Scott explains Electrical Network Frequency analysis, where hum from the power grid in a recording is matched against grid logs to date and place it. He talks to a researcher and sets them a challenge.

A short Vox explainer on the duck curve, the shape electricity demand takes in California as solar output grows. It explains why grid operators struggle to balance supply and demand with lots of solar.

Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, presents GreenArrays' 144-core asynchronous chip at Strange Loop 2013. He explains how idle cores draw almost no power and how tight code minimizes energy use.

The first episode of James Burke's Connections series, 'The Trigger Effect', explores how modern society depends on interlinked technological systems and how quickly it breaks down when they fail, starting with a power blackout.

Isaac Arthur explores space-based solar power, in which satellites beam energy down via microwaves to rectennas on Earth. He discusses feasibility, profitability and its role in spurring space colonization.

Olympic track cyclist Robert Forstemann tries to pedal hard enough to power a 700 W toaster and toast a slice of bread. The film frames it as a comparison of how much energy people consume versus how much they can generate.

A short clip of the Snowbird, a human-powered ornithopter built by University of Toronto students. On August 2, 2010 it sustained altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds, the first such flight.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen argues that CSS Grid changes web layout, showing how to place content in cells independent of HTML source order and reshape layouts with media queries. It makes the case for using Grid now that browsers support it.

Disney Research's demo of quasistatic cavity resonance, which uses a purpose-built room or cabinet to generate magnetic fields that deliver kilowatts of power wirelessly to mobile receivers inside.

Real Engineering looks at why Africa's abundant solar potential is hard to turn into usable power, especially for Europe. It covers the transmission, infrastructure and economic obstacles, and the pivot from concentrated solar to photovoltaics.

Technology Connections explains weaknesses in the US electrical system, centering on how cord and circuit ratings can mismatch and cause fires. It covers extension cords, power strips and plug history in about 25 minutes.

Tech Ingredients builds a larger solar-powered desiccant air conditioner that uses a calcium chloride liquid desiccant with evaporative cooling to cool their lab. The video includes the engineering calculations.

Kenneth Finnegan shows how USB-C Power Delivery trigger boards like the ZY12PDN negotiate 5V to 20V so you can power projects from a USB-C charger, including the color coding for each voltage.

Technology Connections explains how a home can act as a thermal battery by pre-cooling or pre-heating when electricity is cheap or abundant. He shows how this shifts load off-peak and eases strain on the grid.

Tom Scott visits Dinorwig Power Station in Wales, a pumped-storage hydro plant often called Britain's largest battery. He explains how it works and how its role has shifted from TV pickup spikes to balancing wind and solar.

Fully Charged host Robert Llewellyn visits Orkney, where wind, tidal, wave and solar generation plus community energy schemes power the islands. It presents the archipelago as a model for future energy systems.

Justice Antonin Scalia's opening statement at a 2011 Senate Judiciary hearing on the role of judges. He argues that the Constitution's separation of powers is what protects liberty, and that gridlock is by design.

Technology Connections explains why electric kettles are uncommon in the US, centering on 120V circuits limiting power. He tests ways of boiling water on gas, electric ranges and kettles.

In this TEDxBerlin talk, environmental activist Michael Shellenberger explains why he changed from opposing nuclear power to advocating it, after looking at the evidence on Chernobyl, Fukushima and air pollution.

Zack Freedman introduces Gridfinity, his free, open-source modular workshop storage system of 3D-printable bins and baseplates. The video walks through the design, the parametric templates and the many module types that fit parts, tools and accessories.

Kirsten Dirksen profiles Steve Rees, who buried two shipping containers to build an earth-cooled, off-grid 640 sq ft home in Northern California for about $30,000, solar included.

A short 2000s Apple commercial for the PowerMac G4 that plays on the computer being classed as a weapon under US export restrictions, with tanks as imagery.

The Eames Office's 1977 film Powers of Ten starts at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the universe. It then zooms inward to a proton in a carbon atom.

A short SIGBOVIK 2017 presentation by Tom Wildenhain showing that PowerPoint animations are Turing complete, with a working Turing machine built in slides. The talk is delivered deadpan as a serious research result.

A feature-length film by the Makani team chronicling their thirteen-year effort to build energy kites that harvest wind power, with footage from test sites in Hawaii, California and Norway. It shows the engineering, the team and the eventual shutdown.

Shriram Krishnamurthi's PWLConf 2019 talk on the formal notion of expressive power of programming languages, based on Felleisen's paper. It explains how to tell when a feature adds power by whether emulating it requires global rewriting.

Tom Wildenhain's guest lecture for CMU's Esoteric Programming Languages course shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing complete without macros, building up to a mind-bending fractal ending.