As we complete the managed shutdown of DevicePilot by the end of March, this is my last monthly newsletter, and next month our website will cease to exist. I’ve listed some of my best information sources below so you can subscribe to them directly if you choose. 

Smart Energy

• Through most of 2022 the UK exported electricity to Europe over its interconnectors
• From 1 Oct 2022 to 13 Jan 2023 the UK generated more electricity with renewables than with gas.
• Lots of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) - alongside some outright misinformation - being thrown at renewables and EVs by legacy energy businesses, including unfortunately nuclear. The latest angle seems to be all the damage from mining. Great context here from myenergy about mining. And the Guardian article about lithium got its units wrong, so reported numbers that were 1,000 times worse than reality.
• UK spent £215m last year switching-off (“curtailing”) windfarms. This excellent overview explains it’s because of a lack of cables between Scotland and England and lack of storage, and explores how ‘nodal’ pricing could incentivise solutions.
• First SMR design in the US gets design certification (50MW x N). In the UK Rolls Royce is touting a 500MW design as an SMR, on the basis that it can be built in modular form in a factory, though perhaps it’s too big to really qualify as the fundamentally interesting thing about SMRs is that you build a lot of them, thus driving down costs (always nuclear’s Achilles’ heel) through learning-curve dynamics.
• We take the UK national grid too much for granted. Let’s keep in mind Ukraine as Russia’s bombing of critical national infrastructure makes rolling outages the norm.
• A soup-to-nuts treatise by Nat Bullard summarises how the energy transition is going and where it will go next: Everything everywhere all at once.

EV

• EV charging expected to be the fastest-growing source of electricity flexibility according to the UK govt’s recently published EV Smart Charging Action Plan.
• EV is 49% of new buses, 13% of new cars but only 3.8% of new light commercial vehicles. 
• So it’s good news that, even as the BritishVolt gigafactory bid collapses, Oxford’s new electric truck battery factory opens.
• Cumulative EV sales pass $1trn, with 50% of that being in the last 18 months.

IoT

• Congrats to The Things Industries for reaching 1 million connected LoRAWAN devices on its network. Allegedly there are now 270m devices using LoRA globally.
• And finally, the good old Internet of Shit is sure to be with us for a while yet: A Massachusetts school lost access to the controlling software and left 7,000 lights turned on for a year.

Recommended information sources

• Energy transition
• Michael Liebrich’s Cleaning Up
• Debunking FUD: Zeke Hausfather and Auke Hoekstra
• Fusion: Melanie Windridge
• Smart Energy People - 10 episodes on Youtube
• EVs
• The Fully Charged Show
• Colin Mckerracher of BNEF
• IoT
• Stacey Higginbotham (“GigaStacey”)
• Tech progress generally
• Exponential View by Azeem Azhar
• TLDR newsletter

I’ve hugely enjoyed making this newsletter (backissues on the Wayback Machine).

Thank you for reading - and take care. 

-Pilgrim

P.S. If you’d like to keep in touch, my personal email address is <firstname>@<lastname>.org.uk and you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.