The US electric grid is one of the largest, most complex machines ever built—yet much of it was designed for a different era. As demand for clean energy, electric vehicles, and AI-powered infrastructure surges, the grid faces a defining question: Can it evolve fast enough to power the future?

This e-book explores the cutting-edge technologies, startups, and bold experiments reshaping how electricity is generated, distributed, and used across the country.

Inside, you’ll learn how the grid actually works—and where it’s most vulnerable. Discover how EVs and even electric school buses are being transformed into mobile batteries that help prevent blackouts. See how AI and machine learning are making it possible to predict equipment failures before they happen, and why companies like Octopus Energy and Gridware are betting big on smarter, more responsive systems. From wooden utility poles to next-gen charging networks, this collection of stories reveals the surprising ways the grid is adapting for a more electrified, resilient, and intelligent future. Whether you’re in energy, tech, or just grid-curious, this is your guide to the next era of power.

Check out the e-book here.—Tech Brew staff

The tide is high, but submerged kites off the shore of the Faroe Islands are holdin’ on.

The kites are part of the Faroe Islands Space Program, which consists of three kites connected to the seabed by subsea cables. Fitted with generators, the kites collect energy from the underwater currents and tides as they move in a figure 8 pattern. That energy then travels through the subsea cables to transformers on the shore of the Faroe Islands, an archipelago that’s a territory of Denmark.

The project is the brainchild of Minesto, a Swedish tidal energy company. When complete, the program will consist of six kites with infrastructure connected to the islands’ electrical grid, which will provide energy to locals. It’s dubbed the Faroe Islands Space Program because tides are considered a lunar resource.

“As long as the moon stays in its orbit,” Minesto CEO Martin Edlund told Tech Brew, “we are in production mode.”

Keep reading here.—TC

It was half a year into the new millennium when Human Genome Project leader Francis Collins announced internally that the consortium would be presenting a first draft of a fully sequenced human genome at the White House in around a month’s time.

The only problem? The teams didn’t yet have a sequenced genome—it was more like a “pile of DNA” fragments, according to David Haussler, scientific director at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. And the deadline was part of a negotiated tie in the heated race with biotech company Celera.

“That was like a thunderbolt,” Haussler told Tech Brew. “There was no way we were ready to do any kind of presentation.”

A UC Santa Cruz grad student named Jim Kent “worked night and day for four weeks, writing 20,000 lines of C code and icing his wrists periodically,” in order to make the historic milestone possible.

On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair stood, via telelink, by the two teams of rival scientists—Celera’s and the Human Genome Project’s—as they announced the “rough draft” of a full human genome. It was the culmination of decades of work by thousands of researchers all over the world, and Clinton declared that “humankind is on the verge of gaining immense new power to heal.”

In conversations with scientists nearly 25 years later, it’s hard to pin down just one legacy of the human genome sequencing, which supercharged whole fields of biotechnology, laid the groundwork for a genetics revolution, and led to many large-scale follow-up scientific undertakings. But in some other ways, the field is only beginning to live up to some outsized expectations now.

Keep reading here.—PK