Currently Speaking is Three
Come to our birthday party
Today, Friday the 13th (auspicious? appropriate?) this pokey little blog (newsletter? “Substack”?) turns three.
This blog started as the culmination of three things. Firstly, outside some of high profile (and excellent) publications1 the energy community on Substack was largely represented by the voices of angry, contrarian, conservative commentators: Coal-fired Ken Doll, anonymous ragebait bird and whatever-the-fuck-this-firehose-of-bullshit-is. There was very little that spoke to the experiences we’d had as two people working in the industry. Secondly, it was an opportunity to put pen to paper on the endless interesting topics and anecdotes we came across. Lastly, it was a challenge we set for ourselves to try communicating these topics in an engaging way. Energy is so fascinating, but our industry can be very good at making it feel boring!
The experience has been very humbling. We started with an audience mostly comprising friends and family, but it’s now grown to a subscriber list of 2,000 people. We are immensely grateful to everyone that reads and interacts with the blog. Thank you to everyone who has approached us to tell us what they think of the blog, thank you to everyone who has commented on a post sharing their reflections, and thank you to everyone who has ever shared a post with someone and helped us grow.
Before we dive into some reflections on the last three years, we’re hosting a party!
Friday 20th March, 6pm
Fargo & Co. (Swan St Richmond, Melbourne)
Food provided
Tix are $20
Please come and help us celebrate. We’ll tell some stories, do a little IRL review of the last 3 years and just generally hang out and chat. Tickets and more details here.
Alex’s highlights
Ignoring the default Substack “coming soon” and a brief introduction post, our very first post looked at SunCable. At the time, SunCable had just entered voluntary administration and two of Australia’s richest men were in a brouhaha over the future of the project.
We now know who won (MCB), and although you don’t hear much about it these days, it’s still apparently alive and ticking along, aiming to supply power by 2030.
Our first ever article to go viral (ish), was a rather silly article exploring the different ways which people pronounce “AEMO” I’m still convinced it was a facetious suggestion from a mate, but we took it and ran with it and it was a lot of fun. Given the engagement it generated, it clearly resonated with people in industry. Even now I regularly catch myself pronouncing AEMO differently and overthinking it.
But my favourite series is Short Circuits. Not just because it frequently blends energy with the absurd, but because people regularly now send me amazing things. For example, this very recent headline sent to me by James L about exploding nangs in waste-to-energy plants causing millions of pounds of damage. *chef’s kiss*
People see something weird and energy related, and immediately decide that I need to see it and flick me a DM. This is easily my favourite part of writing the newsletter. Please keep sending me stuff.
Declan’s highlights
My first article covered the culture war shenanigans arising from mooted plans to ban gas stoves in the US. However, the one I was really proud of was my deep dive into how the movies from our childhood might inspire us to make it through the energy transition. This took so long to write and was probably better researched than most of my posts about actual things.
Solving the energy crisis with 1990/2000s kids movies
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The topics that I’ve written about that tend to get the best traction have covered algorithms and networks. Seems that there is a lot of interest in the machinations of both monopolies and robots looking to take over energy markets!
I have loved our sillier posts though. Perhaps my favourite post was our post on 1 April 2025, parodying the coverage of senior White House staff accidentally including a journo on their group chat. We took the opportunity to highlight the internal machinations of the Liberal Party working out it’s nuclear policy (which are still playing out).
How the blog has changed
In the early days, we actually did manage to post every week. Unsurprisingly, we couldn’t keep this pace up while still writing interesting things. Our cadence is now closer to monthly and is driven strongly by interesting topics and finding time to write them up.
We also used to include a section in each post called Things Happen (extremely Matt Levine coded) which recapped events from the week.
We played around with different blog types. The enduring example is our Short Circuits series, which captures collections of small stories that wouldn’t necessarily make a standalone post.
We’ve also found themes running through our posts. Both of us have a passion for explaining our industry. Our explainer series (still progressing!) has been incredibly popular. We’ve also written a very wide ranging series of history posts, covering including whaling, coal-fired power stations and residential electrification.
Other tidbits from the past three years
A series we wrote looking at the NEM’s storied history of reviewing the NEM got a mention in a well attended call on the NEM Review.
We’ve had one guest post from friend of the show Mitch O’Neill. Apparently we' couldn’t entice him back.
Our subscribers dial in from all over the world. Outside of Australia, the US, UK and NZ are well represented. We also have a subscriber in Chile! Hola!
We currently have 49 posts in draft. Some are no more than a sentence, others have been almost finished for a year.
Thank you!
If you’ve made it this far, thank you again. Unsurprisingly to anyone who knows us, we’ve got plenty of ideas to keep us busy and to keep you entertained.
Notably, Knowledge Problem, The Texas Energy and Power Newsletter and Volts. There’s also many more excellent publications dedicated more broadly to climate change.