Independent field notes
Practical notes on energy software, connected devices, architecture, and technical leadership.
The omnibus cut CSRD's scope to companies with more than 1,000 employees and 450 million euros. You are out. The questionnaire from your biggest customers is still coming
5 min readMost of Europe's deployed chargers still speak OCPP 1.6, a protocol from a earlier era. New one has been ratified for years, it is now an IEC standard, and there is a newer version on top of it.
5 min readEdge AI sounds like a way to save on cloud inference bills. In practice, it usually is not. The right reasons to go to the edge are latency, privacy, and bandwidth, in that order, and if your reason is not one of those three, stay in the cloud.
6 min readPick wrong and your data layer will crack at exactly the moment your fleet is interesting. The three credible options for energy and IoT time-series in 2026 are TimescaleDB, InfluxDB, and ClickHouse. Each is excellent for a slightly different shape of workload.
5 min readThe old Series A reflex was to raise the round and hire engineering up to twenty-five people. In 2026 that reflex is wrong. AI raises per-engineer output enough that you can stay lean far longer, but the organizational transition does not disappear. It relocates.
6 min readPicking your connectivity is picking your unit economics, and you only get to do it cheaply once. Here is the decision tree I would hand a founder shipping their first ten thousand devices in 2026, with the Polish coverage reality that most guides get wrong.
5 min readEvery heat pump, EV charger, and home battery in Europe is already a grid asset. Most of them are just not aggregated, not addressable, and not paid. The companies that crack the aggregation layer in the next three years will own a category that does not have a name yet.
7 min readIf you are building anything that touches the grid, you will run into FCR, aFRR, mFRR, BRPs, and BSPs within your first three meetings with a utility. The terminology sounds designed to keep software people out. The mechanics are simpler than a Stripe webhook flow.
6 min readClimate tech due diligence is not the same as SaaS due diligence. The code base is usually fine. The risks live in hardware dependencies, certification timelines, regulated market access, and whether the team has ever shipped against a real grid operator.
5 min readThe conventional wisdom is that dynamic tariff customers check the app out of novelty and then forget it exists. Pstryk's data says the opposite. Here is what real engagement looks like and what it means for how you build.
6 min read