Short Circuits #14
Content galore! Super Bowl, folk songs, Reels, nangs and vapes.
Before we kick off this week’s newsletter, we’ve got a couple of exciting announcements!
1️⃣ The first is that we’re hosting a trivia event in conjunction with Australian Energy Week. The trivia night will be 6 pm Tuesday 9th June, at The Decks at The Boatbuilders Yard, just outside the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre where the conference is being held.
Tickets will go on sale shortly, but in the meantime save the date!
🧑🔬 We’re really excited to partner with Australian Energy Week. Our trivia nights have tended to coincide with conferences, but for the first time we’re working with the organisers. Australian Energy Week gets the biggest speakers from across the industry and is always very well attended. As a blog, we’ve spent a lot of our time explaining concepts underpinning the NEM, so we also love that AEW runs pre-conference masterclasses for participants looking to up-skill in some of the niches and vagaries of energy markets.
2️⃣ The other exciting announcement is that AEW have very generously set aside 10 complementary tickets to the conference for early stage career and recent graduates. In order to be eligible for a free ticket, you must be a recent graduate in the energy industry (five years or less post-qualifications), able to attend the conference in Melbourne on the 10–11th June 2026.*
All you need to do to enter is to fill in your details at the linked form below and provide a short paragraph on why you’d like to attend! If you’re not eligible but know someone who might be interested, please share this with them; we’d love to make sure this opportunity gets taken up!
🔗 https://forms.gle/YehYH4JdgivUbj2L8
🎉 Ticket winners will be announced by 14 May 2026.
* (for the avoidance of doubt, flights and accommodation aren’t included and the tickets are only for the main event program).
A powerful performance
The San Francisco 49ers didn’t make Super Bowl LX, but Bad Bunny did, delivering a highly lauded halftime performance. If you’re unfamiliar with Bad Bunny, he’s a Puerto Rican rapper who sings exclusively in Spanish. He’s also a walking Latino thirst trap and one of the biggest artists in the world right now.
His 13 minute performance featured all the hits, including that one song used in all of your favourite Reels, as well as El Apagón, where Bad Bunny sang from atop a power pole.1
El Apagón translates as The Blackout, and is a protest song about gentrification and the state of the Puerto Rican power grid, which has been left in something of mess thanks to successive hurricanes and chronic underinvestment.
In fact the official music video features an impassioned short documentary about some of the problems.
This was the story picked up to varying degrees by the majority of news outlets, and obviously something that Bad Bunny was keen to showcase on the global stage.
However the story that I’d like to bring your attention to is how Bad Bunny beautifully transitioned out of the song right before it entered the interlude… which, yeah.2 English language or not, the NFL was not including that in the broadcast.
Actually people love singing about power infrastructure
After unearthing the Basslink the Song in Short Circuits #13, commenter Tom brought our attention to these beauties.
Put a Light in Every Country Window is a song by Don Henderson, apparently inspired by a trip through the Snowy Mountains scheme.
With lyrics including:
Miners tunnel to feed the fires at Wangi
Others scrape the brown coal at Yallourn
Turbine blades are yielding to the tumbling tons of Eildon
And the Snowy will be finished before long
it’s extremely our shit.
And of course Australia’s greatest piece of power infrastructure and nation-building project couldn’t do without its own dedicated song, the Snowy River Roll written in 1953 by William Lovelock.
And finally, a song we featured way back in Short Circuits #1, Ode to the Stobie Pole now has a full length feature on the internet.
Short content
Springfield, Queensland is a place which I’ve spent almost zero time thinking of, other than checking the map to confirm that actually Forest Lake is Inala South.3 I’ve got even less reason to think about their corporate Instagram account and why that is even a thing. But honestly this is pretty decent content.
Springfield is a master planned community in Ipswich which features entirely underground powerlines… except for this odd and extremely short above ground stretch. Which allegedly no one can explain.
The claimed virality of the powerlines is somewhat questionable given the Daily Mail devotes significant resources to re-publishing the Tweets of former MAFS contestants — but quirky power infrastructure is definitely our kind of lower-case-j-journalism.
But it was engaging enough content to attract over 200 comments, most of which demonstrate the asinine pointlessness of people commenting on corporate Instagram accounts and really highlighted the “no one can figure out why it exists” bit.
There’s something particularly delightful about watching random idiots argue over the hardware mounted on the pole — is it a recloser, a capacitor or a transformer? If it is a transformer, is it oil-filled or dry? Why exactly would you have to use a pole-mounted transformer given there are myriad examples of ground-mounted transformers? I have no clue, and nor will I be confidently venturing my incorrect guess.
Amongst the sea of comments talking about “fuses on poles” or suggesting that “cars run into power poles and cause blackouts” there is a handful of credible-sounding suggestions as to what the reason might be… but we’ll have to wait for part 2 to end this cliffhanger.
Exploding nangs
Shoutout to James L. for sending in this doozy.
Suez operates a fleet of 10 energy-from-waste plants in the UK, recovering energy from two million tonnes of waste annually.
However apparently some of this waste is nangs – nitrous oxide canisters ostensibly used by enthusiastic home chefs for whipping cream, but commonly abused as a low rent party drug. These canisters of pressured gas explode in the waste furnaces, causing damage and costing the company millions of pounds.
Per the article, the EU is looking at introducing legislation limiting canister sizes and requiring age verification. I don’t want to be a naysayer, but this doesn’t seem particularly helpful given a) *cough* Brexit and b) if the various apartment complexes and co-working spaces I’ve inhabited are representative, adults are fucking useless at putting the correct shit in the correct bin.4
Perhaps the government should instead consider a ‘nang deposit scheme’ or launch a campaign encouraging nang users to fully huff their canisters.
Anyway, if this article has got you in the mood for some home cooking, Nangs Delivery Gold Coast will dispatch a 3.3L super nang to your house if for some reason you absolutely require a Grand Theft Auto-themed canister for that urgent huge batch of whipped cream.5
Just absolutely do not stick it in a fire. Please.6
Can’t do that with cigarettes
Staying in the UK and dealing with idiots disposing of things incorrectly, Kaavya J. alerted us to this wonderful content.
Forget the Cheaper Home Batteries scheme, Chris Doel – an engineering YouTuber – recycled 500 “disposable” vapes to construct a 2.5 kWh battery.
Yes it has a clickbaity title and stupid YouTube Mr Beast thumbnail designed to appeal to the average YouTube viewer7 — but it’s a great video which demonstrates the engineering of how large batteries are built up from smaller cells, as well as the absolute absurdity of the e-waste problem we’ve manufactured.
He’s since made a follow up video, using the vape battery to power a small electric car, a 2000s era REVAi.
Good content indeed 🫡
The NFL has blocked embedding this video for… reasons? Thaaaaaaaanks maaaaaaaaaates.
Actually, all of his songs were the censorship-friendly radio versions. Most of his songs have language that would make your gran blush.
As distinct from the fictional city of The Simpsons, which I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about.
And given the recycling and sustainability focus run at my child’s kinder, I would venture that children are actually much better at recycling than adults.
If 3.3 L is a little too much cream or Breaking Bad is more your style, you’re in luck!
Also, after searching for nangs to research this story, Google now serves me nang ads. Including on my work laptop. Which my colleagues can see. Godammit. Thankfully Renew Economy isn’t riddled with banner ads 🧐
12 year olds, apparently?
Interesting and amusing reading as per usual mate. Keep em coming. (PS it's a pole mounted microwave).
> And the Snowy will be finished before long
What did he know?