At 4:17 on a bright Tuesday afternoon, the power grid made a decision. Not a human operator in a control room, but an algorithm balancing thousands of batteries, solar panels and hungry electric vehicles.
This is the quiet revolution in energy: software is becoming infrastructure. Across the country, utilities are beginning to use machine learning to predict where a cloud will land, which neighborhood will switch on its air conditioners, and how to move a clean electron before it is needed.
The challenge is not simply generating more power. It is orchestrating it.
What happens next will depend on whether these new tools make the system more legible to the people who depend on it. Technology is only as interesting as the world it helps us build.
