NOTEBOOK

Investigations

This is the one place on the site where interpretation lives — and even here, every claim is traceable to a pinned number. Each investigation is a reproducible package: the research question, the scenario file at a pinned engine tag, the exact reproduce command, the committed expected outputs (which are the CI regression fixtures), a rerunnable figure cell, and a full provenance and attribution block.

Posts that depend on non-redistributable continental data are labelled continental-tier reproduction — you reproduce those with your own free ENTSO-E token. See Reproducibility & data.

The thermometers we didn’t keep

temperature-record

UHI

MIDAS

pre-registration

homogenisation

We built the most careful urban/rural comparison the UK temperature record allows — every rule pre-registered before a single temperature was read, so the result could not be steered. The record’s answer: of 1,537 stations, only 46 can be proven to have stayed rural since 1975, and only six of those kept a usable 43-year record. Britain let the control group die. What can still be measured runs against the sceptical priors: the Met Office’s processing shows no sign of manufacturing warming.

Aug 1, 2026

5 min

The 38 gigawatts nobody has named

CCC

hydrogen

gas

dispatchable

The Climate Change Committee’s 2050 system leans on 38.28 GW of plant it calls only “low-carbon dispatchable”, and does not say what it burns. Run it against forty years of weather and it is at full output in every single half-hour the system falls short. Serving those hours takes 161 GW — and 93 GW even after the pathway is handed every advantage it could ask for.

Jul 28, 2026

19 min

Forty winters against the Committee’s 2050 grid

adequacy

CCC

heat-pumps

EVs

weather-years

Put the Climate Change Committee’s own 2050 electricity system against every weather year since 1985, with cold driving demand rather than just wind driving supply, and it fails in all forty. It keeps failing in all forty after being handed the better turbines its own pathway implies, the whole of its own demand flexibility, and every interconnector as firm supply.

Jul 27, 2026

24 min

The wire we have, the wire we’re buying, and the wire money can’t buy

constraints

transmission

wind

curtailment

CP2030

Take the Clean Power 2030 fleet and run it against forty years of real weather under three grids: today’s Scottish boundaries, the planned reinforcement, and a Britain with no internal wires at all. The upgrade does its job — the boundaries essentially stop binding — but it recovers only a third of the constrained energy. The rest is surplus no wire can move.

Jul 10, 2026

8 min

How deep is your source? Geothermal wells vs the heat-pump peak

heating

heat-pumps

geothermal

hydrogen

storage

adequacy

Electrify all of Britain’s heating with air-source heat pumps and the grid needs 23 GW more peak generation and 20 TWh more hydrogen store. Sweep the heat source deeper — a warmer well at every step — and by 2 km both penalties have collapsed by ~85%. Depth is a substitute for generation and storage.

Jul 10, 2026

9 min

Reproducing observed 2024 gas burn

validation

2024

gas

The load-bearing validation result, presented as a reproducible package: the model dispatches 2024 gas within 0.91% of observed outturn.

Jul 9, 2026

4 min

Wind cannibalisation and the CfD top-up wedge

cannibalisation

CfD