Later today Britain’s last remaining coal-fired power station will shut down, bringing to a close 142 years of power generation that began when the world’s first coal-fired power station, at 57 Holborn Viaduct in London, started operation on 12th January 1882.

When I created https://grid.iamkate.com in 2012, coal accounted for 40% of Britain’s power generation. It was overtaken by gas in 2015, nuclear and wind in 2016, and solar in 2019. As I write this, wind is producing 40% of Britain’s power.

#Introduction (July 2024 edition)

Hi, I’m Kate. I’m a 41-year-old software developer based in the south-west of England. I created my first website in 1998, and I’m best known for my National Grid: Live site at https://grid.iamkate.com. In my day job I’m the Development Director at https://itseeze.com, where in 2007 I created a content management system that’s now used by thousands of sites for organisations across the UK and Ireland.

In the same way most of us say “goodbye” without realising it derives from “god be with ye”, maybe one day people will end conversations with “likensubscribe”

Some days I can really relate to our office shredder:

“Threads works on the viewer with a peculiar power: one finds oneself horrified, fascinated, numbed, provoked, unsettled, made restless”

— a review of the BBC’s nuclear winter drama Threads, which was so unrelentingly bleak that after its 1985 broadcast to mark the anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings it wasn’t shown again until 2003

#Threads

I designed the 12-bit rainbow palette for use on https://grid.iamkate.com. It consists of twelve colours chosen with consideration for how we perceive hue, chroma, and luminance. The palette uses a 12-bit colour depth, so each colour requires only four characters when specified as a hexadecimal colour code in a CSS or SVG file. For more details, see https://iamkate.com/data/12-bit-rainbow/