Creative Connectivity

What’s a kWh?

I recently attended an excellent IET lecture by Michael Podesta on the pre-history of climate change. What stunned me was a question that came up in the discussion at the end, which was the simple one – “What’s a kiloWattHour?” Despite having used the unit for decades, including a fair amount of time working in the energy sector, I’d never really thought about it. It was evident I wasn’t alone from the audience reaction. For almost everyone, it was just a unit of energy that appeared on our gas and electricity bills.

Many people know what it is in that context. It’s what an electric fire uses in around half an hour. It’s what an old 100W filament bulb uses to light a room for 10 hours (a new LED bulb will light the same room for 100 hours using the same 1 kWh). It’s what your washing machine uses for a low power wash, your dishwasher for an ECO cycle, and what your oven uses to roast a small chicken. Depending on where you live, that kWh of electricity costs between 1p and 50p. But what does it mean? That’s an important question, as almost every discussion about energy usage, net zero and energy security ends up talking about kWhs. So, unless we can relate those kiloWattHours to some sort of physical experience, it’s difficult to engage with the discussions we need to have about energy, which is why they become academic arguments that few relate to. It started me thinking about how to solve that and bring the kWh to life. The first step is go back to where it started and look at James Watt.

A T-shirt and Science Teaching

My favourite T-shirt has four words on it – the elements Fluorine, Uranium, Carbon and Potassium. When I first saw it, I loved the joke and bought it. Since then, I’ve worn it frequently, including at many technical events and conferences around the world. Yet I’ve only found around a dozen people who have got it. Even when amongst fellow engineers, I’m more likely to be asked what it means. So, I’ve made up a story about it. Which goes like this:

The Smart Glasses Contract

When smartphones first came out, nobody in the industry predicted how we’d end up using them. Nokia commissioned some fascinating research on the use and psychology of photo-taking, which they published as an interesting book – Mobile Photo. Its main findings were that most rolls of film had a Christmas tree at either end, from which they predicted that smartphones would mostly be used for photos of friends and pets, which would be shown on the phone. This was back in 2000, when social media was in its infancy and mobile networks barely supported the transfer of grainy photos.

Nobody in the industry saw where things would go. Or go wrong. What was a novelty has changed people’s lives. So far, it has been overwhelmingly consensual. Individuals have the choice of what they capture and upload. Most probably don’t fully understand the implications og having their images online, and some abuse it, but there is a fairly well defined contract. With smart glasses, that is about to change. To illustrate why, let me ask a simple question. Do you appear in any online porn videos?

Let’s Applaud Plaud

PublishedSeptember 9, 2026
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For the last five or six years I’ve been bemoaning the fact that most of the audio industry has been ignoring one of the great earbud innovations – the battery box. When Bragi came up with the concept in 2014 it was a very necessary invention. Earbud batteries didn’t last more than an hour at most, so you needed a neat way to store and recharge them. Apple refined it into the form we know today with their first Airpods, after which it’s been more or less left as it is.

It’s always felt like an opportunity missed. There’s so much more you can do with it. With the greater versatility of earbuds using the new Bluetooth LE Audio specifications it can do volume and media control (and a few companies have got around to do that). With Auracast, it can be used to find and display the available broadcast audio streams around you. You can put in camera in it to scan QR codes to select music streams. (Apple filed a rather basic patent on that back in 2019, and there are rumours it might soon see the light of day). Or you can take advantage of the decent sized battery to add a cellular modem and SIM to provide a local access point for audio and data. So, I was really pleased to see Plaud do exactly that with their new Plaud One. They’ve put an AI agent into the battery box to let you make sense of conversations and summarise your day.

Hearing Loss at the Edinburgh Fringe

Ten years ago, there was virtually no mention of hearing loss at the Edinburgh Fringe, and very little to help anyone who had hearing loss. The Traverse, the main professional theatre that participates in the Fringe rather than the International Festival, had a hearing loop, but that was more or less it. Signing was limited and I don’t recall many shows exploring the effects of hearing loss or deafness until “Louder is not always Clearer” arrived on the Summerhall stage in 2019.

A lot has changed. After the interruption of Covid, the Edinburgh Deaf Festival https://www.creativescotland.com/news-stories/latest-news/archive/2026/07/fifth-edinburgh-deaf-festival—bigger-brighter-bolder-than-ever came into existence. Celebrating deaf culture, language and heritage, it runs as an integral part of the Fringe. This was its fifth year, where it had grown to 80 events. Equally importantly, a recognition of hearing loss has become more obvious in the mainstream. In the first week of the Fringe, Dundee Rep’s excellent show “The Singer” won a well-deserved Fringe First Award. It was an object lesson in how to put BSL, captioning and deaf experience together on stage for every audience member. It was a brilliant example of how to do it properly and tell an important story in a way that everyone could appreciate.

The Burnham Boost for British Manufacturing

It was good to wake up to another upbeat policy announcement from Andy Burnham, in this second week of his premiership, proposing that secondary schools let their students study subjects like manufacturing and AI in addition to core academic learning. Messages of support for manufacturing have been few and far between for most of the last fifty years. The mantra has been that Maggie killed UK manufacturing, although more recently the mantle of industrial destroyer has shifted to Ed Miliband.

Within manufacturing circles it has become a constant complaint that the cost of UK energy is crippling industry, with Ed Miliband’s NetZero policies placing an almost impossible burden on companies trying to compete internationally. Whether he will supplant Maggie as the chief architect of UK manufacturing decline is something only time will tell, but there was a collective sigh of relief when he was exiled to the Foreign Office. So, what do these new announcements mean for UK manufacturing and technology?