What this publication is, and what it isn't

Neo Lattice X is a small editorial outfit covering the British power system. I am Anya Sokolov; this is my masthead and my byline on most of what gets published here. The brief is narrow on purpose — GB grid economics, flexibility markets, storage, predictive maintenance at the distribution level, and the arithmetic of decarbonising power.

There is no shortage of energy writing on the internet. Most of it falls into one of three buckets: corporate press releases dressed up as analysis, partisan advocacy that flatters its own assumptions, or trade-press shorthand written for people who already know the jargon. This site is none of those, hopefully. It is reporting, in plain English, with numbers cited from the operators and regulators who publish them.

What we cover

Five beats, organised loosely:

• Grid economics. Balancing costs, constraint payments, BSUoS, capacity market signals, the cost of curtailment. The published cost is £2.5 billion a year and rising; we trace where it actually goes.
• Storage & flex. Battery storage cleared in Dynamic Containment, vanadium flow projects in early commissioning, the financing of 10-hour-plus chemistries that nobody has built yet at scale.
• Community energy. Microgrids, peer-to-peer trading pilots, the new wave of council-led virtual power plants. The economics are starting to add up; we look at where, and why.
• Policy & markets. Ofgem rule changes, the slow grind of grid-code reform, ESO procurement, ENTSO-E scenarios. What changed, and what it costs.
• Tech & AI. Predictive maintenance on transformers, dissolved-gas analysis at the second-by-second cadence, the use and misuse of machine learning in DNO control rooms.

If a story doesn't fit one of those buckets, it probably belongs somewhere else.

What we don't cover

Domestic tariff comparison. Electric vehicle reviews. Climate politics as performance. Speculative cold-fusion or hydrogen-everywhere essays. There are good outlets for those; this isn't one of them.

Standards

Numbers are linked back to a primary source — National Grid ESO, Ofgem, ENTSO-E, BEIS, Elexon, the operator's own filings. Where a figure is illustrative, the line above the chart says so. Corrections are pinned to the top of the piece, with a date, when a number or attribution changes; we do not silently edit.

The "live" grid telemetry on the homepage is illustrative demo data — directionally accurate, refreshed periodically, but not a settled feed. The numbers in stories are the ones to trust.

Cadence

Long-form dispatches land on Thursdays, generally one a week. The Grid Briefing — a Sunday evening newsletter that distills the week's regulatory and market moves — goes out at 18:00 GMT. There is no daily wire here; if a story breaks on a Tuesday, it gets written properly and lands Thursday.

Get in touch

Tips, leaks, corrections, polite disagreements: [email protected]. PGP key on the about page. If you work at an operator, DNO, or regulator and want to talk on background, that is also fine; the rules are the usual ones.

Welcome aboard.