About
How I ended up writing about energy
Growing up, I didn't know what I wanted to do. Like a lot of students, I got to the point where you have to pick a major and picked one, computer science. It wasn't a bad choice, but it wasn't the thing I actually thought about outside of class.
What I actually watched, over and over, was footage of megaprojects: construction, renewable energy builds, off-grid living, the slow shift away from fossil fuels. I didn't plan to get obsessed with it. It just happened, the way people get pulled into a sport or a hobby, except mine was solar farms and battery chemistry.
MAOWCE is what came out of combining the two. I still love computer science, it's most of my major and most of my daily work, but the site is where the other obsession gets to live: clean energy journalism written the way I'd want to read it, sourced, specific, and honest about what the numbers actually say.
The idea I keep coming back to is independent living: energy where you make your own power for your car, your heater, your house, instead of depending entirely on a grid that can fail in a storm or a shortage. Solar on the roof, a battery in the garage, and a blackout becomes somebody else's emergency, not yours, and when you're producing more than you use, you can sell the extra back and get paid for it.
That last part is what surprised me most: how much this brings people together. A community solar project connects neighbors who'd never have talked otherwise. An off-grid build shows a family how to ride out an outage the rest of the block struggles through. Independence, done right, isn't isolation, it's what makes a community more resilient.
This site is one student's attempt to track that shift as it happens, article by article, source by source. I'm not an expert and don't pretend to be. Every article is built on primary sources read in full, every number traced back to where it came from, and corrected when it's wrong. Transparency has the full standard; the FAQ has the short version of everything else.