Editor’s letter
Why I’m writing this.
For the last several years, the smartest people I know in this industry have been reading press releases dressed up as journalism. The numbers were thin. The visualizations were thinner. The thesis was usually somebody else’s. Negawatt is the alternative.
I have spent my career inside the energy transition, in product and operations roles at companies enrolling distributed batteries, EVs, and solar into virtual power plants. Day to day, I work with the people building, financing, and dispatching the systems that are reshaping the grid. The conversations I have with them rarely sound anything like the coverage that gets published about them.
The gap is partly about depth. Most energy media has to be everything to everyone, which means the deepest analysis lives behind paywalled trade reports priced for fund managers and consultancies. Practitioners get the surface. The other part of the gap is format. The energy transition is a story about thousands of decisions being made in megawatts and dollars per kilowatt-hour, and those decisions deserve to be visualized, not buried in body copy.
Negawatt is built around three commitments. Every piece is grounded in original data, sourced from the agencies, monitors, and operators who actually have it. Every piece is visualized properly, in the spirit of the New York Times graphics desk and the better data-journalism shops that came after. And every piece is written by people who could sit down with the operator on the other end of the data and have a real conversation.
The first issue, on a decade of US residential battery deployments, is a preview. The numbers are doing a lot of work. The argument runs through the charts, not around them. That is the standard.
If you are an operator, founder, trader, investor, regulator, or analyst working in this space, this publication is for you. If you read it and you have a tip, a number we got wrong, or a story we should be telling, I want to hear about it. The email is at the bottom of every page.
Brady Manning
Editor, Negawatt · May 10, 2026
The thesis
What Negawatt is, and isn’t.
Negawatt is a publication. Not a blog, not a newsletter, not a Substack. The newsletter is part of how Negawatt reaches readers, but the work itself is published on negawatt.news, archived on negawatt.news, and built to last.
Negawatt is data-driven. Every claim is grounded in numbers we can show you. When we do not have the data, we say so. When we are speculating, we label it speculation. When sources disagree, we surface the disagreement instead of papering over it.
Negawatt is independent. We are not affiliated with any utility, OEM, fund, trade association, or vendor. Sponsored content, when it exists, will be clearly labeled and editorially separated. The line between editorial and sponsorship is the line that decides whether a publication is worth reading, and we will hold it.
Negawatt is not trying to be everything. We do not cover residential rooftop installer drama, EV product launches, or fossil-fuel-industry boilerplate. We cover the parts of the energy transition where new market structure, capital flows, and software are reshaping how the grid actually works.
Coverage
The beats.
Six categories shape how we cover the energy transition. Each beat has its own data sources, its own running thesis, and its own running list of people we trust to ground-check our work.
Flagship reporting on the people, projects, and capital shaping the buildout. Long-form data stories with a single thesis and a deep visual treatment. The home battery story is a Dispatch.
DER adoption, VPP enrollment, residential storage, EV-grid integration. The retail edge of the energy transition: where customers, software, and the grid actually meet.
FERC, state regulators, ISO market design, interconnection reform. Where rules become market structure, and where market structure becomes opportunity.
Climate venture, growth, infrastructure, and project finance. The rounds, the M&A, the PPAs, and the people writing the checks behind the buildout.
Wholesale prices, capacity auctions, ancillary services. The unit economics underneath every project decision in ERCOT, CAISO, PJM, and the rest.
Software, hardware, and AI infrastructure reshaping how power moves. From DERMS and OMS to the data centers reshaping load itself.
Editorial standards
How we work.
Independence is non-negotiable. Negawatt accepts no payment, equity, or in-kind support from any party covered editorially. Sponsored content, when it exists, is labeled and produced separately from the editorial calendar.
Sourcing is rigorous. Every data claim cites its origin. Where we use proprietary data behind a paywall, we say so and link to the source. Where we model or estimate, we publish the methodology in line with the piece.
Corrections are public. If we get it wrong, we fix it on the page, append a dated correction note, and acknowledge it in the next newsletter. The full corrections policy is on the ethics page.
AI usage is disclosed. We use language models for research, drafting, and visualization scaffolding, the same way the rest of the industry does. We do not publish AI-generated prose under a human byline without that prose being substantially rewritten and verified. The full AI policy is also on the ethics page.
Who is behind this
The byline.
Editor
Brady Manning
Brady is a product and operations leader who has spent his career inside the energy transition, with hands-on work in distributed energy resources, virtual power plants, and grid-edge software. Brady is also the author of The Negawatt Weekly, a practitioner’s briefing on the VPP and DER market.
The data-journalism format that shapes Negawatt is informed by NYT Graphics, the FT visual team, and the better post-Snow Fall scrollytelling work of the last decade. The opinions are his own.
Negawatt will bring on additional contributors as the publication scales. If you are a writer, analyst, or data journalist working in this space and want to pitch, the address is hello@negawatt.news.