Kuiper diary

5 October 2026

Two things are open to everyone today. Both are free to use on a phone or a computer.

What the Kuiper is

The Kuiper gives every item a whole number, called a key, and works out where that item belongs from the number alone. Nothing is placed by hand. Two short rules do the work:

• the square root of the key sets how far out the item sits (the live page adds a half before taking the root);
• multiplying the key and keeping only the remainder (MOD) sets where round the circle it sits.

The same two rules place one item or billions. Today they place the recorded lines of code across our repositories. The same rule could give a key to every substation, cable and solar panel on a grid.

Learn the Kuiper

One circle, one dot and two numbers. One number sets the distance, the other sets the angle. Slide them or type them, and steer the dot onto the targets. A link then ties the two numbers into one key, and you are doing by hand what the Kuiper does for everything it holds.

There is almost nothing to read. You learn the rule the way you learn to ride a bicycle. A copy button gives the two rules as spreadsheet formulas, so anyone can rebuild the Kuiper in Excel or Google Sheets.

See Through

Type the name of a UK substation and press GO. The stars gather into the grid, the real map and the satellite view appear inside the circle, and then a model of the substation rises in three dimensions on the real ground, with towers along the mapped line routes.

The model is illustrative. It is drawn by one rule from open map data: what is mapped is shown where it is mapped, and the rest is estimated from the voltage and labelled as drawn. The same code covers about 5,800 mapped substations. Try: cowley.

What it could become

• Travel the grid. Light the published circuits that leave a substation and follow them from site to site.
• Start from a project. Point at a field, a roof or a factory and see the nearest substations, the voltages there and the likely route lengths, in seconds.
• Narrow it down step by step. Compare sites one step at a time, so a person can organise the published evidence and the right questions for a network operator. That is the aim behind "see to grid connection probabilities iteratively". No connection probability is calculated today.
• Carry it anywhere. Both run in a browser, Learn the Kuiper also works offline, and the rule fits in two lines of a spreadsheet.

Why this matters in the UK now

The wars in Ukraine and Iran showed how exposed the country is to imported fuel and to its price. More home-grown electricity is the way out, and a large part of the difficulty is no longer building the solar farms, wind farms and batteries. It is connecting them. Projects can wait years for a grid connection, and many applications are made for places where connecting was always going to be hard.

A tool that lets anyone see the grid around a site, quickly and for free, will not replace the studies a network operator must do. It may help before them: better questions asked earlier, and more people who understand how the grid is laid out and why a connection is easy in one place and hard in another.

Our ambition is faster electrification, and 75 terawatts of peak solar capacity worldwide by 2050.

What it does not do

It does not say whether a project can connect, what it would cost or when. It combines published map features with estimates, clearly marked as drawn from open data, and does not calculate network capacity, connection probability or a connection offer. Decisions still belong to the network operators and to qualified people.

Substation and line data: (c) OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Map: CARTO. Imagery: Esri and its providers. The placement rule follows H. Vogel (1979); its multiplier is the golden-ratio constant of D. E. Knuth's Fibonacci hashing; the numbers behind both are Fibonacci's (1202).