With the Feast of All Hallows rapidly approaching I thought it would be apt to explain how the grid is haunted by a concept that doesn’t really exist. A pre-occupation with a made-up concept risks the security of our power grids. In this blog I will explain how “vars” aren’t real, and treating them as if they are is creating existential risks on our power grids.
Not being able to properly explain reactive power is common in the energy industry – ask a dozen people to explain it and you’ll get twelve different answers. Most will reach for the beer-glass analogy where real power as the liquid and reactive power is the froth, or mutter something about “energy sloshing back and forth” on the grid. More sophisticated responses will mention capacitors “injecting vars” and inductors absorbing them. These phrases are repeated so often that they’ve become folklore. Unfortunately none of them describes what actually happens in power grids.
“Vars” in particular is an accounting fictions that obscure the underlying physics. And because we’ve replaced understanding of the physics with shorthand, we now incorrectly believe that anything producing current including batteries, solar inverters, or a clever algorithm, can perform the same stabilising role as the electromagnetic machines that built our power system.This misunderstanding could one day cost us the grid.
Photoblogging
I recently photographed the Mount Washington Resort in Bretton Woods, NH. That name triggered a memory but I couldn’t immediately place it.
Turns out, this was the site of the 1944 economic conference that has shaped policy the world over up to this very day.
Photoblogging
Yesterday, I drove up to the northern reaches of New Hampshire. It’s a pretty area and, in fact, was once its own “country” called Indian Stream.
Here are some photos from the area:
Alberta Ascending
Kevin O’Leary shares some insights about Alberta’s prosperous future that many are likely not aware of. He also has some choice words for selfish politicians in Québec.
Does A Bear Poop In The Woods?
National Post- Yes, the Nazis were socialists
Pierre Poilievre has enraged his critics by being historically accurate
Common Denominators
Left wing authoritarians.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
The world’s fastest shrinking countries in one graphic.
The population bomb is going bust
Weekend Watch: The Age of Depopulation With Nicholas Eberstadt. What will the energy industry and landscape look like in a world where population decline is almost universal? Think about that as you watch this fascinating discussion about the reality no one is talking about – population decline.
https://pipelineonline.ca/weekend-watch-the-age-of-depopulation-with-nicholas-eberstadt/
Recurring Urges
In short, before ending up in prison, the vast majority of the perpetrators, the supposedly downtrodden and marginalised, have at least five prior arrests, with almost half having 10 or more, and one in seven, 20 or more. At which point, the phrase that comes to mind is the nature of the beast.
Other phrases may conceivably occur to readers.
Those with a taste for grim humour are steered towards this quite strong indication of how a crime rate can improve when just three burglars – with over 200 convictions between them – flee the police in a stolen car before colliding with something solid and ceasing to be.
An illustration, one of many, of how a very large fraction of crime could be prevented by dealing decisively with a surprisingly small number of persistent offenders.
Oh, there’s more.
Lies, Damned Lies And Crime Stats
JORDAN: What is “taking property without right?”
PHIL MENDELSON: Well, that’s theft.
JORDAN: Then WHY NOT CALL IT THEFT?
MENDELSON: I can’t speak to….
JORDAN: The solution was to come up with “Taking Property Without Right?”
The Science Is Settled?
I’ve always been skeptical of the disease model of addiction, and the treatment industry that flows from that theory. Disagreements of a fundamental nature in the scientific community on a host of issues are remarkably common, contrary to what the mainstream media would like you to think.
Smith was steadfast in her belief that her actions were volitional from the start. Her drug use and crimes were not the products of an immoral character or a faulty brain incapable of change, but rather of an environment where heroin was accessible and desirable. This outlook determined her experiences in prison and beyond, ultimately leading her to dedicate her life to challenging predominant medical models of addiction with her research. Today, she is an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Sell The Forest Save The Trees
Lawrence J. McQuillan- Private ownership of forests and land reduces wildfires
As with most public roads, bridges, dams and water systems, public lands urgently need maintenance. But governments underinvest in land management because officials view land as a liability, meaning that upkeep is considered an expense, not an investment.
Root Causes
Homicides per 100,000 in El Salvador:
2015: 103
2016: 81.0
2017: 60.2
2018: 50.4
2019: 35.8
2020: 21.2
2021: 18.1
2022: 7.8
2023: 2.4
2024: 2.0
2025: 1.1When the people doing crime are taken off the street, crime falls. Yes, it's that simple.
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 11, 2025
Supply Mismanagement
Even for the CBC, I have to admit that they explain the supply mismanagement situation pretty decently, particularly regarding the troublesome import quota issue. So while it is possible for American dairy products to get into Canada tariff free, importers first have to convince Canadian processors to allocate production space to them. I’d hazard a guess that they would have to pay for that space, which is why it doesn’t happen very often. Overall production quantities are ultimately limited by the intricate Canadian dairy pricing mechanism; in other words, consumers must be prevented from getting a bargain.
CUSMA sets import quotas for 14 categories of dairy products. That allows an annual volume of each category to enter Canada tariff-free, and any imports exceeding the quota would get hit with sky-high tariffs of 200 per cent or more.
Much of the quota volume is allocated to major Canadian-owned dairy processing companies such as Saputo and Agropur. Industry analysts on both sides of the border say such companies have little incentive to import U.S. products that would compete with their own.
The Devil In The Details
The Food Professor- CUSMA-Exempt: The 93% Mirage
…for Canadian food exporters, the 93% exemption rate is more fiction than fact.
Juxtapose!
Tristin Hopper- From killings to rape, the heinous crimes that could get you less jail time than a Freedom Convoy organizer
It’s certainly the case that you can do an awful lot of heinous things in Canada before a prosecutor would ever think of asking for seven years. Below, a not-at-all comprehensive list of things you can do in Canada, and have the Crown seek a lighter sentence than the one they’re seeking for the organizers of the Freedom Convoy.
Has AI Been Overhyped?
Turns out that AI may not be the replacement to mankind that we’ve been told it is:
The buzz about AI coding tools is unrelenting. To listen to the reports, startups are launching with tiny engineering teams, non-programmers are “vibe-coding” entire apps, and the job market for entry-level programmers is crashing. But according to a METR experiment conducted in the spring of 2025, there’s at least one cohort that AI tools still aren’t serving.
METR performed a rigorous study (blog post, full paper) to measure the productivity gain provided by AI tools for experienced developers working on mature projects. The results are surprising everyone: a 19 percent decrease in productivity. Even the study participants themselves were surprised: they estimated that AI had increased their productivity by 20 percent. If you take away just one thing from this study, it should probably be this: when people report that AI has accelerated their work, they might be wrong!
Quoi?
Blacklock’s- Never Heard Of Fed Honour
Québec residents surveyed in a federal focus group say they’ve never heard of the Order of Canada. The civil honour has been awarded nearly 8,000 times since it was introduced 58 years ago.
Prison Reform
The best prison system in the world. pic.twitter.com/rxSyu2et2C
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) July 4, 2025
Que The Music From Jaws
Tasha Kheiriddin- Carney will have no choice but to kill supply management
If Carney is serious about leading this country and these talks, he must put the national interest ahead of political orthodoxy. As this weekend showed, Trump will not hesitate to call Canada’s bluff. The Americans want the big cheese — and they’ll hold everything else hostage until they get it.
Macdonald Laurier Institute- Quebec’s dairy farmers are blocking free trade in Canada
There are just over 4,200 dairy operations in Quebec out of 9,400 nationally. The objectives of supply management focus on protecting these 4,200 operations at the cost of the other 190,000 Canadian farmers, as well as Canada’s 40 million citizens.