The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder: Recent Episodes
XE Network
Straight talk about the world’s transition from fossil fuels to renewables with energy expert Chris Nelder
Millions of Americans are sweltering under heat domes this summer, with temperatures soaring to record highs when weather systems stall. The grid feels the strain of these events too.
This extreme heat often creates a precarious situation that pushes electricity demand to levels never seen before, while forcing generation out of service. But why does summer weather get stuck like this in the first place? And is climate change making it happen more often?
For answers we can look to the North Atlantic jet stream, the high-altitude wind steering weather across North America and Europe. Our guest visualizes this as a ski-slope, where a steep gradient between temperatures keeps the jet racing fast and weather moving. Though, as the Arctic warms faster than the rest of the planet, the slope flattens, slowing the jet stream, which has it meandering in bigger waves. Slow weather becomes stuck weather. Whatever comes along, heat, rain, or drought, can then sit around for longer. Our host Chris Nelder dug into this mechanism in Episode #65, the ninth part of our climate science miniseries. That was back in 2018, years before “heat dome” became a household phrase.
In this conversation, recorded February 2018, Valerie Trouet, of the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, explains how she reconstructed the jet’s summer position back to 1725 from the density of tree rings in the British Isles and the Balkans. As the planet warmed, the jet lunged north and south far more often. Jet stream excursions like this have increased sharply since the 1960s, looking nothing like the natural climate variability of the three-century record.
Valerie Trouet shares with us how a five-millimeter core from a living tree reveals the climate’s history. She also covers why the jet’s slowdown makes more of an impact than how far it swings. Valerie’s lab has continued publishing on this topic, and in a 2024 paper in Nature, her group took the reconstruction back to 1300 CE, reading jet behavior in seven hundred years of European harvest dates, grain markets, and mortality. Her former postdoc went even longer in a 2025 study tracing hemisphere-wide jet patterns across a full millennium, and so far, their frequency looks essentially unchanged on that extended timescale. Today’s episode is one of our lagniappe releases, so the complete original conversation can be freely available for the entire Energy Transition Show audience.
The Statistical Review of World Energy 2026 is out, offering the first complete look at global energy data for 2025. The report’s 75th edition, now presented in partnership with the energy think tank Ember, reveals a year in which demand for every form of energy hit a new record high.
But growing overall demand, even for fossil fuels, doesn’t mean the energy transition isn’t happening. Renewables grew more than any other form of energy for the first time outside of a recession, with solar power accounting for 72% of the increase. And global electrification reached a tipping point, with electricity demand growing 3%, faster than energy supply overall. China alone added the equivalent of Germany’s entire annual electricity consumption in a single year. These are just a few of the indications that the future of global energy use is increasingly electric, even as regional paths differ.
In 2025, rising electricity demand was met entirely by low-carbon sources, with renewables and hydro overtaking coal as the largest source of generation. Fossil generation fell overall, demonstrating that fossil fuels are being substituted rather than supplemented.
Solar and storage are clearly taking the lead in the global energy system, and they’re not looking back, as global battery storage capacity grew 66% last year alone. Solar already produces more electricity than gas in major parts of the world, and its lead in power generation will only grow.
In this episode, we are joined by Aditya Lolla, Interim Managing Director at Ember, and Euan Graham, Senior Electricity and Data Analyst at Ember and a lead author of the report, to share the key findings from this new update on all the energy data that matters.
We’ll dig into the report’s new total energy supply measure, which we explored in Episode #259. We’ll hear how China’s road fuel demand is now falling, redefining the assumed long tai
Right now, Great Britain has more than enough new solar projects waiting to be connected to its distribution grid to meet its 2030 renewable energy target.
Italy and Poland could reach half their 2030 solar targets just by connecting the solar already sitting in their queues.
Across just eight European countries, there’s a whopping 375 GW of wind and solar PV projects, and an even larger 455 GW of battery storage projects, just languishing in connection queues. Together, these wind, solar and battery resources are roughly equivalent to the entire generation capacity of those countries.
These are the shocking findings from a new study commissioned by the European climate nonprofit Beyond Fossil Fuels. Its estimates are deliberately conservative: the study values the trapped clean energy projects at around €100 billion, with the real total almost certainly higher. In this episode, we welcome Tara Connolly, their Programme Lead for Energy Markets and Grids, to share what the report found and learn what can be done about this sad state of affairs.
And the crunch isn’t only on the supply side. Data centers are now muscling to the front of the same queues. In Ireland, they already consume half of greater Dublin’s electricity, while households’ EV chargers, rooftop solar, and home batteries wait behind them.
It will not surprise our longtime listeners at all to learn that unlocking all this mostly comes down to regulation, with many of the fixes already on the books, just not enforced.
It’s taken a very long time to arrive, but next-generation geothermal power is finally becoming a commercial technology. Even though the virtues of geothermal have long been known and appreciated as clean, low-impact, and capable of running continuously, the few conventional geothermal installations in the US operating for decades supply less than half a percent of the nation’s electricity. The promise of next-generation, “enhanced” geothermal, which we discussed back in Episode #248, is that it can be used almost anywhere. But business and technical challenges have held it back.
Until recently, that is. Now, several companies have overcome those challenges and are hard at work on new projects in the US and elsewhere, including Fervo Energy’s Cape Station project in Utah, which is expected to begin delivering power this year and expand to 500 MW by 2028.
And the resource is significant: According to the IEA, the technical potential for next-generation geothermal wells less than 5 km deep in the United States is greater than 7 terawatts, a number that’s more than five times the nation’s total existing electricity generation capacity. The US Department of Energy projects that as much as 300 GW of that could be economically deployed by 2050, enough to meet up to 40 percent of anticipated demand growth. Some studies suggest that if new data centers are sited strategically, geothermal could power all of them. And costs are coming down fast. The IEA estimates they could fall by as much as 80 percent, which would make geothermal cost-competitive across the US. All that development would also create or preserve hundreds of thousands of jobs, many using skills that transfer directly from oil and gas extraction and fossil power generation.
To lay out the opportunity, the obstacles, and the state of the art in enhanced geothermal, we are pleased to be joined by Dr. Emily Pope, a senior fellow at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Her report, Drilling Down—What it Will Take to Harness the Potential of Next-Generation Geothermal, was published in April and offers a comprehensive review of the sector. So if you gave up on geothermal years ago, this episode will show you what’s changed.
This is the third and final part of our miniseries about South Africa’s energy transition, based on Chris’ travels there in September and October of 2025. The first part was Episode #264, in which we heard how the end of apartheid precipitated reform of the country’s energy systems. The second part was Episode #276, where we learned how South Africa is reforming its electricity system from a state-owned monopoly to a free market, and from coal to renewables.
South Africa has enough wind and solar resources and land to generate at least three times as much power as its entire annual load, but the country is still locked into its old coal-fired electricity grid. Market reform is the key to unlocking that potential.
In this episode, we’ll hear how those reforms can help deliver a just transition for South Africa, the most economically unequal country in the world. Because there, the energy transition isn’t only about cheap, clean power; it’s also a driver of economic justice. Today, some of the poorest households pay up to three times the grid price for electricity drawn through informal connections, and formalizing that power is a chance to deliver cheaper, fairer access to those who need it most.
We’ll also learn how utilities and regulators across sub-Saharan Africa are working to integrate unsanctioned, distributed solar and storage into their grids. In South Africa, roughly 60% of those systems were never reported to the utility, and in Kenya the figure is effectively 100%. The economics are hard to argue with: the $1.7 billion Africa spent on solar panels last year is already meeting more demand than the $20 billion a year it spends on diesel fuel, with more than 85% of it self-financed. That bottom-up adoption is now transforming energy systems not only in South Africa, but across the entire region.
This is the second part of a miniseries about South Africa’s energy transition, based on Chris’ travels there in September and October of 2025. The first part was Episode 264, in which we heard how the end of apartheid precipitated reform of the country’s energy systems.
South Africa is arguably one of the most exciting places in the world to see the energy transition unfolding right now, because after nearly 150 years of relying almost exclusively on coal for its energy, it is finally implementing reforms that will allow its electricity system to integrate more renewables onto its grid.
Eskom, the state-owned monopoly, has owned and controlled the grid for over a century. Its aging coal fleet still provides around 80 percent of the country’s electricity, even though solar power is now far cheaper, and it has been able to block new renewable projects because they threatened its coal business. But now Eskom is being broken up into separate units for generation, transmission, and distribution. And the country is launching its first wholesale electricity market — the South Africa Wholesale Electricity Market, or SAWEM — opening the door for renewables to compete with coal.
At the same time, there is also an enormous and growing informal supply in the form of distributed solar — enough to meet a quarter of the country’s electricity demand. Many businesses and residents are installing their own solar and battery systems, often without any kind of permission from or notice to the utility. That is simultaneously creating an entirely new and complex sort of electricity system that’s hard for utilities to manage, while also making the system far more resilient. In fact, distributed solar batteries are credited with putting an end to the “load shedding” blackouts that plagued customers for over 15 years.
Formally and informally, South Africa is rushing headlong from its coal-fired past and into the renewably powered future. Clean generation led by solar surged past 30 percent in late 2025, while coal fell to a record monthly low. South Africa’s experiment in restructuring a vertically integrated, coal-dependent grid offers an early look at the politics, economics, and surprises that other markets will face as they take on their own transitions to renewables.
In this episode, we’ll be hearing from experts who are closely involved with the electricity reforms in South Africa. In the next episode, we’ll see how those reforms play an important role in delivering a just transition.
In mid-2026 we’re experiencing the largest energy crisis the world has ever faced. The sudden and prolonged disappearance of one-fifth of the global supply of oil and LNG, set in motion by the Iran war we covered in Episode #272, has sent import costs soaring. World leaders are now confronting the risks of fossil fuel dependence as never before.
The high costs and outright physical shortages of oil and gas are driving inflation across the global economy. But that’s not all. The crisis is also weakening currencies in importing economies, deepening their debt, stalling growth, and transferring wealth on an enormous scale. By 350.org‘s count, more than $150 billion has already moved from ordinary households into the balance sheets of oil and gas companies.
A new report from 350.org, Out of Pocket: How Delaying Global Fossil Fuel Phase Out is Draining Households and Economies, puts hard numbers on the price of delaying the energy transition. In today’s conversation, we welcome the lead author, Clémence Dubois, Global Campaign Manager at 350.org, to share its findings. Clémence explains how the delay imposes opportunity costs, economic and environmental justice costs, and national security risks on importing countries. She makes the case for why this crisis, unlike the six previous oil shocks, might be the final nail in the coffin of the world’s dependence on imported oil and gas. And we’ll see how many countries are already switching to domestic renewables and electrification — because for them, delay is no longer an option.
For years, transition skeptics have argued that what’s really happening globally is “energy addition,” where renewables are piling on top of fossil fuels rather than pushing them aside. The data that’s just landing from 2025 finally puts that argument to rest.
For the first time, global electricity generation from fossil fuels fell, not because of a pandemic shutdown, recession, or unusual weather, but simply because renewables grew faster than demand. Power-sector emissions dropped along with it, also a first. Solar recorded the largest single-year increase of any electricity source on record, with the exception of coal’s rebound as the world re-opened after 2020. And renewable generation surpassed coal in the modern era for the first time.
These are just a few of the important findings in Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026. To unpack what they mean, and what they don’t, we welcome back to the program Nicolas Fulghum, Senior Energy and Climate Data Analyst at Ember and one of the report’s lead authors. Nic was last on the show in Episode #254 reviewing the 2025 edition of this report, which became our most popular episode of the year, and which we re-released without paywall in Episode #266.
In today’s show, we’ll see how the structural decline in fossil generation, long-anticipated by transitionistas, finally arrived. We’ll hear why solar’s growth rate refuses to slow even as the technology matures. And we’ll explore how the second fossil fuel shock of the decade, this time from the Iran war we covered in Episode #272, is pushing more countries to accelerate their move off imported fuels. The energy transition isn’t coming. It’s here, and it’s getting more unstoppable every year.
In the sunniest parts of the world, solar and batteries are already the cheapest way to build new power generation capacity on an unsubsidized full system cost basis, and that cost advantage is expanding quickly.
By the end of this decade, solar and batteries could affordably supply 90% of electricity for most of the world’s population at less than €80/MWh—that’s a full system cost, including fuel-based backup, for about US 8.7¢/kWh. While this is already cheaper than building a new gas-fired grid, given that European gas prices spiked to ten times their normal level during the 2022 energy crisis and remain volatile today, the gap is only likely to widen.
But beyond 2030—well within the lifetime of any new power generation system built today—solar and batteries will almost certainly be the cheapest, most reliable, and least volatile way to expand a power grid. Doubling down on fossil gas generation under these conditions, as many governments are contemplating, would be a terrible mistake, both economically and geopolitically.
That is the central finding of a model developed by Tom Brown, professor for Digital Transformation in Energy Systems at the Technical University of Berlin. Tom also led the development of the open-source toolbox Python for Power System Analysis (PyPSA), and based this analysis on a blog post titled “Solar and batteries can power the world.” If you doubt the conclusions, you can run the model and test the assumptions yourself.
In today’s episode, we’ll dig into how the model works, what happens when you add wind to the mix, and why battery costs could halve again by 2050, making solar-dominated grids dramatically cheaper than anything we can build with gas. We’ll also examine the land question and find that powering the world with solar would take just 0.3% of global land, a fraction of what we currently devote to livestock. And we’ll revisit how to meet that last 10% of demand, a topic we last explored in Episode #188 with Paul Denholm of NREL, and hear Tom’s case for methanol as a surprisingly practical backup fuel.
The attacks on Iran by US and Israel have touched off a regional conflict that has resulted in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil and LNG transits, and is doing severe, ongoing damage to oil and gas infrastructure throughout the Persian Gulf. We are now in a new global energy crisis.
IEA coordinated the largest release ever of oil from strategic reserves to calm the oil market, but traders shrugged it off and oil prices kept climbing, because a physical disruption at this scale is totally unprecedented. Even so, veteran oil traders and journalists have warned that the world is still not recognizing the depth of the actual peril it’s in. IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol called this crisis “the greatest global energy security threat in history” and said, “I believe the world has not yet well understood the depth of the energy security challenge we are facing.” IEA also admonished governments to take steps to conserve fuel, including urging their citizens to drive more slowly, work from home, take public transport and car sharing, avoid air travel, and switch to electric cooking. The last time IEA called for such wide-ranging demand reduction was in the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo.
The consequences are already cascading well beyond oil: Fertilizer prices have surged 25 to 40 percent, and a similar increase in the price of diesel will flow through to essentially everything, causing “fossilflation.” In response, governments across Asia have begun curbing consumption: Bangladesh is shutting universities early to save power, Thailand and Vietnam are pushing civil servants to work from home, and Myanmar has imposed fuel rationing. And that’s just the beginning.
To help us understand this rapidly-worsening reality, we are joined by Rory Johnston, one of the most widely cited independent oil market analysts, founder of the Commodity Context newsletter, and host of the Oil Ground Up podcast. Johnston, who typically avoids alarmist price calls, says $200 a barrel minimum is now on the table. We discuss why the world’s emergency supply tools aren’t working, where oil prices could go from here, and why this crisis has thrown the world into uncharted territory.
It could take the world years to recover from this…but in that interim, it’s likely to accelerate the energy transition.
To help everyone cut through the fog of war and disinformation, and understand what is happening and how it will affect them, we are publishing this episode without a paywall. So please share it widely.
China’s total CO2 emissions went flat and slowly started declining almost two years ago, but you probably wouldn’t know it from reading the news about how its pipeline of coal power plant projects surged to a record high in 2025.
Similarly, recent data shows that China’s coal power output fell by 1% in 2025, even as it built more coal plants than it had in a decade.
These kinds of conundrums are typical for China, with its complex interaction of economic forces and top-down state planning. But once you understand what’s driving them, it all makes sense—just not a Western economic kind of sense.
To help us untangle this picture, we welcome back Lauri Myllyvirta, co-founder and lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), who last joined us in Episode #138, all the way back in 2021. We were overdue for an update.
In this episode, we dig into this coal conundrum—why China added 78 GW of new coal capacity in 2025, more than India built in an entire decade, even as customers pay $14 billion a year in capacity payments to coal plants that may not even run. We look at the 315 GW of solar and 120 GW of wind China added last year, and how 75 GW of new storage is helping to displace coal power. And we discuss why China’s clean energy investments now make up more than a third of its GDP growth—without them, 2025 growth would have been 3.5% instead of 5%.
Although its fleet of coal power plants continues to grow, there is good news here. Because as the largest energy consumer in the world, China’s declining emissions mean emissions are declining globally.
Lord Adair Turner shares his global perspective on the state of the energy transition, as seen from the Energy Transitions Commission.
What do aspiring energy transition advocates need to know to become effective changemakers in their communities?
As one of the most energy vulnerable countries on earth, Japan faces a difficult choice: join the petrostates, or the electrostates?
Global carbon emissions from the power sector may be close to peaking thanks to an accelerating energy transition.
Chris returns to Paris to interview co-lead Tim Gould about the new World Energy Outlook 2025 report, and to explore the futures it contemplates.
A history of South Africa’s energy transition in the power sector kicks off a new Energy Transition Show miniseries on the African country.
We review some examples of social, political, and technological approaches to climate change mitigation that should give us reason to be optimistic.
Over the past decade, China has transformed from a heavily coal-fired country to the undisputed global leader in the energy transition. The pace keeps accelerating: In April 2025 alone, China installed more solar than Australia has in its entire history. By 2030, as little as one-seventh of China’s projected spare solar manufacturing capacity could electrify everyone without power in 88 low-income countries.
Yet, this progress has not been recognized by much of the West, which still fixates on headlines about “building three coal plants a week” while missing that China is getting far ahead of US decarbonization efforts. China’s vast exports of energy transition solutions are rapidly decarbonizing other emerging economies, while the nation’s share of global clean energy patents jumped from 5% in 2000 to 75% today. Chinese companies now spend ten times more on electricity R&D than US companies and match the combined energy R&D spending of the US and EU together. The innovation advantage has flipped.
To understand China’s oversized role in the energy transition, Muyi Yang and Sam Butler-Sloss of Ember join us to break down their report China Energy Transition Review 2025. We’ll review how China is routinely beating its own transition targets by three to six years. We’ll hear how Chinese firms have announced over $200 billion in overseas clean tech manufacturing investments, surpassing the scale of US investment abroad under the Marshall Plan. Solar, batteries, and EVs are growing three times faster than China’s overall economy, hitting nearly 10% of GDP. Chinese solar exports to Namibia, Cambodia, and similar countries now exceed the entire centralized power generation capacity of those countries.
The result: what took decades with old energy is happening in years with solar. China’s enormous commitment to the energy transition is a strategic path to economic growth and economic and political power, and it heralds the end of fossil fuel’s dominance of the global energy system by 2030.
For our 10th anniversary, we reflect on our work so far, and consider what the next ten years might require. Whereas we spent the past decade focusing on techno-economic subjects, like explaining climate science and climate policy, and showing that energy transition technologies are practical and affordable, the next decade is likely to be far more political. We no longer need to justify the concept of the energy transition. Our job now is scaling up solutions and overcoming the resistance to them.
To help us explore this pivot, we welcome back Kingsmill Bond from Episode #152, along with his frequent co-author Daan Walter. Both are with energy transition think-tank Ember, where along with Sam Butler-Sloss they’ve published reports that clearly articulate what many observers are missing: an “electrotech revolution” reshaping geopolitics. They reveal staggering data: 70-80% of car sales in developing economies like Nepal and Ethiopia are already electric, while China’s fossil fuel demand dropped 1% for the first time ever. Nearly every nation has 10-1000x more renewable potential than needed for its energy independence. Developing economies are seizing that opportunity while developed economies sabotage their own electrification by resisting change and taxing electricity at three times the rate of gas.
So join us to celebrate our 10th anniversary! And get ready for an even faster decade of the energy transition as countries choose to lead in the electrotech revolution, or get left behind.
Alaska is an energy superpower with more untapped renewable resources than most countries. Yet its largest population, in the Anchorage area, faces a real risk of blackouts beginning in 2027 due to declining gas supply from the nearby Cook Inlet gas field, which is likely to force this historical major supplier of oil and gas to import LNG to keep its residents warm and keep the lights on. A key part of getting ahead of the crisis is addressing transmission dysfunction so severe that it turns 6-cent renewable electricity into 20-cent retail power due to ‘pancaking’ tariffs.
In this episode, we explore Alaska’s sole electricity transmission grid, which connects most of the major population centers along what is called the Railbelt. We learn about how Railbelt utilities are part of a system that’s overbuilt, unoptimized, unnecessarily expensive, and slow to change. For example, four rural electric cooperatives built more than $1 billion in unnecessary gas generation between 2012-2016 while knowing gas supplies were declining. Despite sitting atop an estimated 18 gigawatts of tidal energy potential in Cook Inlet alone, the four Railbelt cooperatives lack economic dispatch coordination, wasting tens of million annually through inefficient scheduling of gas-fired generation. The Railbelt utilities could transition away from their dependence on gas and toward the vast renewable resources surrounding them, but it would take a kind of political leadership that is currently lacking in the state. We dive into how the regulatory agencies could help Alaska transition to renewables, as well as why they haven’t done so thus far.
We also take a quick look at the future of Alaska’s famous oil pipeline, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), and some of the expectations for nuclear power in the state.
This episode is the third and final part of our miniseries about the energy transition in Alaska.
Most people probably think of a “microgrid” as a campus or neighborhood that can “island” itself and run independently when needed, but otherwise stays connected to the main grid most of the time. But in Alaska’s remote communities that aren’t even accessible by road, residents depend on microgrids for their very survival in extreme conditions.
For this episode, Chris traveled to Kotzebue, Alaska, a community above the Arctic Circle that has become an international leader at integrating renewable energy by pioneering wind-diesel hybrids, innovative wind-to-heat technology, and Arctic solar systems that achieve remarkable performance. We explore how Kotzebue is using innovative approaches to energy transition solutions to lessen their dependence on diesel fuel while improving the health and welfare of their people.
This episode is part of our miniseries about the energy transition in Alaska.
In October 2024, Chris visited the world’s first all-electric farm while traveling across New Zealand.
In today’s episode, we speak with the farm’s owner and founder, Mike Casey. In addition to operating the farm, Mike is CEO of Rewiring Aotearoa, a sister organization to Rewiring America. Rewiring Aotearoa works to advance New Zealand’s energy transition by encouraging residents to deploy renewables and export excess power to the grid, and to replace their fossil-fueled machines with electric ones. Mike travels extensively across Australia, New Zealand, and major cities across the globe as an evangelist for electrification, encouraging communities to electrify and go solar. His farm serves as a real-world demonstration of these principles in action.
Because Mike’s work is so inspirational and universal, we’re making this episode one of our occasional lagniappe shows, available in front of the paywall for all listeners to enjoy in full. We invite you to share this episode widely! And we hope Mike’s inspiring message of electrification and transition will inspire you to support the show and explore more stories like this in our members-only back catalog.
In the summer of 2025, Chris traveled to Alaska to explore the state’s unique energy transition story by interviewing some of its energy experts.
Like every place, Alaska has a unique set of challenges and opportunities in the energy transition, and can offer insights drawn from its experience to the rest of the world. Alaska’s extreme conditions and remoteness make it a proving ground for a wide array of energy transition solutions, as it grapples with a melting permafrost, supply chain constraints, dependence on federal support, and declining fossil fuel production in an age of climate change and climate action.
The state’s greatest energy need is for heat during its long, very cold winters that typically last eight to nine months. In this conversation, Aaron Cooke, an architect and project manager at NREL’s Alaska Campus in Fairbanks, joins us to discuss the lab’s research on building techniques designed to retain warmth while ensuring healthy indoor environments. Their work tests designs to construct buildings that are comfortable, healthy, durable, and affordable in harsh climates, all while contending with logistical challenges, cultural needs, and climate adaptation.
This episode cuts through the noise around energy transition progress with hard data from one of the year’s most important reports.
Despite claims from both “fossil gradualists” who would like to see the energy transition fail, and “net-zero puritans” who deny that the energy transition is happening at all because emissions are still rising, the transition is very much under way and gathering momentum. Countries are switching to renewables, electrifying transportation and decarbonizing heating faster than even the most seasoned energy analysts thought was possible, while the fossil fuel holdouts still white-knuckling their strategies are quickly dwindling in number.
Ember, a clean energy think tank, published a report in April titled Global Electricity Review 2025 that plainly lays out these facts. One of its lead authors, Nic Fulghum, joins us to discuss the report’s findings in a conversation absolutely packed with the data you can use to win any debate with a transition denier.
Nic outlines how solar is growing faster than any energy source in human history, electrification of transport and heating are advancing quickly enough to materially slash fossil fuel demand, and power generation from fossil fuels is headed into structural decline. Global power-sector emissions may finally be close to peaking, thanks to the accelerating energy transition.
Various biofuels such as ethanol, biodiesel, sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), and wood for power plants are labeled as renewable and carbon-neutral. But are they really?
If a farmer converts food-producing land to grow corn for ethanol, does that acre actually reduce carbon emissions? When trees are cut down to fire power plants, can we have confidence they’ll be replanted quickly enough to deserve the “renewable” label?
Our guest in today’s conversation has spent the past six years traveling around the world to research these questions, and he finds that the answer is nearly always ‘no.’
Mike Grunwald, a veteran reporter and author who was our guest on this show in Episode #1, nearly ten years ago, has published a new book sharing the results of his extensive research into the many approaches that have been tried to produce bioenergy, reduce agricultural carbon emissions, increase crop yields, and modify consumer diets. Titled We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, it includes a comprehensive study of the bioenergy solutions that have been attempted and their unintended consequences.
This is a ‘must-listen’ episode for policymakers, investors, and anyone interested in bioenergy’s true role in climate solutions.
On April 12, the British government took control of British Steel under an emergency authorization in order to prevent its last blast furnace from shutting down. Blast furnaces produce primary steel from iron ore and account for about 93% of global primary iron production, but they also generate large amounts of CO2. Alternative, low-carbon technologies are expected to replace them as the energy transition proceeds.
But retiring a technology—especially one as critical to national security as steelmaking—and replacing it with another is a process that should be conducted carefully and deliberately…not on an emergency basis.
This kind of “mid-transition” problem is one our guests have studied in depth. Emily Grubert is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences at the University of Notre Dame who previously joined us in Episode #185 to discuss the mid-transition. Joshua Lappen is a historian and engineer working as a postdoctoral research associate with Emily at Notre Dame.
In this conversation, we review the facts of the British Steel takeover, including why letting the blast furnace shut down was deemed to be an unacceptable risk. We examine the options for decarbonizing steelmaking that will eventually displace blast furnace technology. And we consider what impact Trump’s global tariff war may have on the transitioning of steelmaking, and what some of the geopolitical implications of that may be for the steel industry in Britain, and the world.
This episode is the final part in our miniseries about Australia’s energy transition.
In late 2024, Chris traveled to Australia and recorded interviews with a wide range of experts who are intimately involved in the energy transition there. We featured some of them in the earlier episodes of this miniseries, namely, Episodes #234, #235, #246, #247, and #249.
In this episode, we take a close look at South Australia, where rooftop solar alone already powers the entire state grid at times. By 2027, South Australia plans to operate with 100% variable renewable energy, making it the first gigawatt-scale grid in the world to achieve this milestone.
The challenge? SA Power Networks, the distribution grid operator, doesn’t control generation, transmission, or metering, and doesn’t buy or sell electricity. This means South Australia must figure out how to maintain a stable, reliable grid consisting largely of customer-owned energy resources.
In this conversation, James Brown, Head of Network Strategy at SA Power Networks, explains how his team of engineers and stakeholders are finding innovative solutions to meet this challenge. Their approaches will offer valuable lessons for grids worldwide as they, too, transition to electricity systems almost entirely powered by variable renewables.
Will Russia finally get on board with the energy transition, or will it just white-knuckle its energy exports all the way down to zero?
Dr. Martin Green, the “father of solar cells,” recounts the evolution of modern solar PV cells, and we interview the CEOs of two CSP companies in Australia.
What will it take to make next-generation geothermal energy economically competitive and commercially available all over the world?
Numerous energy innovations in Australia help to integrate DERs, VPPs, microgrids, advanced solar and grid technologies, efficient buildings, and more.
How is the Australian government is working with the grid power sector to plan and execute its transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewables?
How is Great Britain developing a coordinated plan to evolve all of its energy networks toward complete decarbonization?
Heat pumps are a low-cost way to decarbonize space heating. Dr. Richard Lowes explains how to design policies to encourage the adoption of heat pumps.
What are the implications of the IEA’s view that world demand for all fossil fuels will peak and begin a slow decline within the next five years?
In this second part of a miniseries on how the UK is evolving its energy system, we discuss innovations on the electricity grid.
In this first part of a miniseries on how the UK is evolving its energy system, we discuss its world-leading efforts to meet its decarbonization goals.
Why have most economic models consistently underestimated the actual speed of the energy transition?
Europe’s energy transition is still gathering momentum and moving ahead according to European energy expert Jan Rosenow.
Why do governments continue to push nuclear power when it is the most expensive, risky, and slow way to decarbonize the power grid?
What are the specific industrial sectors and processes that produce greenhouse gas emissions, and how can we decarbonize them?
Is China relying on coal to power its growth, or renewables? Are their emissions on track to increase, decrease, or go flat? We review the facts!
Chris travels to Australia and interviews Giles Parkinson, a longtime journalist and observer of the energy transition Down Under.
Can the energy transition happen fast enough if investor-owned utilities (IOUs) continue to operate the US grid under a regulated monopoly business model?
Our guest today says no.
These profit-driven utilities have used their monopoly status to protect their market position and undermine the energy transition. Their control over generation, transmission and distribution systems allows them to fend off competition and slow down progress toward a cleaner energy future.
That’s why John Farrell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) argues in a recent report that it’s time to break up these utility monopolies, shifting grid ownership and control to the public. In this episode, we discuss how today’s dominant monopoly utility model arose, why it persists, how it is an impediment to the energy transition, and what can be done to reform the utility business so that it serves the public, and not the other way around.
Two decades ago, there was a surge of interest to make appliances, buildings, and utility meters smarter. Startups emerged to explore ways to monitor and manage electricity usage and optimize grid power, aiming to better align with the increasing supply of variable renewable energy.
At the same time, utilities began rolling out millions of so-called smart meters, promising to reduce costs for ratepayers. This advanced meter infrastructure would provide the information needed to use less electricity during peak times – shifting consumption to periods when renewable generation was abundant and prices were low.
However, the promise of a “smart” future didn’t exactly happen as expected, with many efforts fizzling out.
Now, with the advent of new technologies, making buildings and appliances smarter and more grid-interactive seems more achievable than ever. This shift can lower costs for everyone and make the grid more responsive to variable sources of renewable energy.
But to achieve this goal, we’ll need utility reform, proactive regulators, and leadership at the federal level. In this two-hour episode, we discuss the challenges that have held back the “smart home” vision with Mission:data founder Michael Murray. Michael has been on the front lines of this effort for 20 years, and has some clear ideas about what it will take to overcome the hurdles and turn this vision into a reality.
Why have our climate policies failed to significantly reduce carbon emissions? What new strategies could help us decarbonize the global energy system five times faster — as is needed to avoid the worst climate scenarios?
Our guest in this episode believes he has some answers to these questions.
Simon Sharpe has been personally involved in the crafting of climate policy in the UK for over a decade. He designed and led flagship international campaigns for climate policy in 2020-2021, when the UK hosted COP26, and has held key roles in the UK Government, including as head of a private office to a minister of energy and climate change. His diplomatic experience includes postings in China and India. Currently, he is Director of Economics for the Climate Champions Team and a Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute. Simon has published influential academic papers and created groundbreaking international initiatives in climate change risk assessment, economics, policy, and diplomacy.
In his 2023 book, Five Times Faster—Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change, Simon lays out why the institutions of science, economics, and climate diplomacy that should be helping us are holding us back. Chapter by chapter, he forensically analyzes why so many of our climate policies have failed to produce the desired results, demonstrating how science is pulling its punches, diplomacy is picking the wrong battles, and economics is fighting for the wrong side. More importantly, he outlines how to develop alternative policies that could actually work.
The transition from oil-burning vehicles to electric vehicles (EVs) has hit a few speed bumps over the past year, sparking widespread media coverage, but not much insight. A confusing tangle of narratives has emerged: Are EV sales surging or stalling? What does it mean for Ford and GM to adopt Tesla’s charger connector when Elon Musk just laid off his entire charging network team? And if the new federal NEVI program is expanding public fast-charger networks, why are so many of those chargers broken?
In this comprehensive 2.5-hour episode, we untangle these narratives and bring some clarity to this ever-evolving picture.
Joining us for this conversation is Raj Diwan, an expert with many years of experience in trying to actually build and operate networks of high-speed public chargers. We take an exhaustive tour through the state of the EV charging business, including the costs and challenges of deploying and operating chargers; the changing standards for EV charging cable connectors; the implications of Elon Musk’s recent decisions about Tesla’s charging network; the various business model challenges for EV charging network operators; the challenges that utilities have in providing power to the chargers; the varying costs of charging for EV drivers; the state of the federal NEVI grant funding program; and the state of the EV market.
What is the full potential for distributed solar power in the US?
Many models have been developed to explore how a decarbonized US energy system could look, consistently finding that solar power would be the dominant source of electricity. Yet, we don’t really know the full potential for distributed solar. Even the term “distributed solar” isn’t very well-defined, potentially referring to many different kinds of solar power installations.
In today’s conversation, we review the available estimates for small rooftop and ground-mounted systems typically found on buildings, solar panels on canopies over parking lots, and innovative floating solar arrays over bodies of freshwater. Additionally, we explore emerging options such as installations on brownfield sites, agricultural lands, and alongside roadways.
Then we add it all up to see how big of a role distributed solar could actually play in a fully decarbonized US electricity system—with a surprisingly large result! But you’ll have to be a premium member and listen to the end to find out what it is.
In this episode, we are joined by Robert Margolis, a Senior Energy Analyst with the Strategic Energy Analysis Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (or NREL), which is part of the US Department of Energy. With more than 20 years of focused research on solar in the US, and his deep familiarity with energy technology and policy and energy-economic-environmental modeling, he is one of the top experts on the potential for distributed solar in the US.
Most climate communicators emphasize the risk of climate change, in the belief that if only people understood how dangerous it is, they would do something about it.
But what if terrifying messages about rising sea levels and life-threatening weather events have the opposite effect? What if they only serve to turn people off, rather than motivate them to act?
And what kinds of messages do resonate with people and get them interested in taking action on climate and participating in the energy transition?
In this episode, we are joined by the Jessica Lu, the Associate Director of Strategy and Analytics with Potential Energy’s Insights Lab. Her team has used established market research techniques to test various messages to unearth what motivates humans to care about climate change. The insights she shares with us are simultaneously surprising and obvious, suggesting much more successful strategies for climate communications.
Because we feel that this information is critically important for all climate communicators to understand, we decided to make this episode one of our occasional lagniappe shows and put it in front of the paywall so that subscribers and nonsubscribers alike can enjoy it. So, nonsubscribers, now you can see what you’ve been missing! And we hope you will all share this episode widely with your friends and colleagues.
The United States faces significant challenges in deploying enough transmission capacity and interconnections to support a modernized grid. Approximately 2.5 TW of new clean wind, solar, and storage capacity is currently on hold — twice the country’s current generating capacity of 1.28 TW. These projects are just awaiting transmission interconnections. Building the necessary infrastructure and securing these interconnections would revolutionize the U.S. power grid, likely eliminating all fossil-fuel (and eventually nuclear) generation.
However, investor-owned utilities have historically obstructed the development of new transmission capacity, both within and between their regional transmission grids. In 2011, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) sought to address these barriers with Order 1000, but utilities resisted, attempting to undermine and weaken the order. Despite some progress within Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs), no new transmission projects outside of these RTOs have been realized under Order 1000. This bottleneck has hindered the energy transition and state-level goals to expand clean energy use and phase out fossil-fueled power under their own renewable portfolio standards.
In response, FERC introduced Order 1920 in May this year, aimed at compelling utilities and regional transmission organizations to undertake long-term regional planning of transmission systems.
In this episode, we are rejoined by Ari Peskoe, Director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, to walk us through the history of Order 1000 and to explain the implications of the new Order 1920. He’s one of the top scholars in the country on transmission regulation and we’re very pleased that he was willing to share his expertise with us once again.
This 80-minute discussion gets quite technical, but after listening to it you will begin to see a clear picture of a future in which new transmission lines unlock the potential of the wind and solar resources in the US and help us completely decarbonize the power grid.
In recent months, reports have circulated that data centers, cryptocurrency miners, and AI technologies are suddenly increasing electricity demand, allegedly straining power grids. These declarations have prompted calls for the hasty approval of new gas-fired power plants to bolster generation capacity. But should we believe these claims?
We remain skeptical.
As the energy transition progresses towards “electrifying everything,” there is little doubt that significant loads will transfer to the power grid. However, we have yet to see evidence that this shift is outpacing grid capacity. In fact, we have good reason to believe that much of the projected demand has been overestimated – in part because utilities have a long history of projecting demand that never materialized.
In today’s episode, we try to separate power demand fact from fiction with Mike O’Boyle, Senior Director of Electricity at Energy Innovation, a San Francisco-based energy transition think tank. Over the past several months, Mike and his colleagues have been urging regulators to resist the panicked rush towards new gas infrastructure and consider cleaner alternatives. We’ll explore the origins of the alleged cloud electricity demand surge narratives, assess the real picture of modern computing demand, and discuss viable solutions. As we will uncover, much of the prevailing discourse is not about a genuine power shortage but rather the efforts of certain political figures to boost tax revenues, often at the expense of public welfare — and is ultimately a lapse in regulatory oversight meant to protect the public interest.
Energy transition is often depicted as a choice between different supply-side technologies such as wind or solar versus oil and coal. However, the demand side of the energy transition — focusing on efficiency improvements to buildings, adopting walking and biking over driving, and electrifying consumer appliances — deserves just as much attention.
Would you believe that widespread adoption of demand-side measures like these could cut the UK’s energy demand in half without sacrificing services or quality of life? That’s one of the key insights our guest in this episode has to share.
Nick Eyre is one of the most well-informed experts on the demand side of the energy transition. He is Professor of Energy and Climate Policy, and Senior Research Fellow in Energy, at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University in England. He serves as the Director of the Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions, which is UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI’s) primary investment in energy use research. He is also a Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Integrating Renewable Energy, which is undertaking research on the combined, technical, economic, social and policy issues in moving to electricity systems with very high levels of variable renewables.
For the past five years, Nick has led a comprehensive project involving hundreds of researchers to review nearly 500 publications on the demand side of energy. This project concluded at the end of 2023, and he joins us today to share its key insights. He’ll help us understand the most important demand-side decarbonization strategies in 2024, and what we can do to accelerate their deployment. It’s a really comprehensive, yet very accessible (and not too geeky) discussion that offers at least a few practical insights that all of our listeners could readily consider applying in their own lives.
Clean hydrogen is expected to be an essential pathway to decarbonizing the economy. The US Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 offered a generous tax credit known as “45V” for clean hydrogen production, but left it to the US Treasury Department and the IRS to define the rules for earning the credit. So they sought input on the rules by issuing an RFI (Request for Information), and aspiring hydrogen industry players, think-tanks, policy advisors, and the public submitted their guidance. After the proposed rules were issued, tens of thousands of additional comments were filed. A final comment period on the rules ended on May 10.
Eric Gimon of Energy Innovation, a San Francisco-based clean energy think tank and a major contributor to the 45V discourse, previously discussed their guidance for the IRS in Episode #192.
In this episode, Eric rejoins us to discuss the proposed final rules, and their team’s comments on them. On the whole, they are optimistic that the rules will spur robust investments in the burgeoning US green hydrogen sector. With potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits on the line, it’s important to get the details right, so we explore them in depth in this 90-minute discussion—which earned a rare off-the-charts Geek Rating of 11. We also address concerns and criticisms raised by prospective hydrogen producers whose projects may not align with the new regulations.
The dialogue surrounding so-called ‘just transition’ initiatives in the US has primarily focused on the workforce: How can communities reliant on well-paying fossil fuel sector jobs find new opportunities for those facing unemployment? Are there state or federal retraining programs available to facilitate their transition into new roles? Moreover, what industries can offer new, equally good jobs?
What hasn’t been studied nearly as much is the fiscal impact of losing industrial activity related to fossil fuel extraction, processing and delivery. How much public revenue is really at stake in the energy transition? Which states face the highest jeopardy? And how can communities dependent on fossil fuel revenues navigate their transitions while continuing to support essential public infrastructure, such as schools and libraries, once these funds dry up?
In today’s conversation, we speak with an expert who has studied the fiscal impact of the energy transition extensively: Daniel Raimi, a fellow at Resources for the Future (or RFF), an independent, nonprofit research institution based in Washington, DC. Daniel shares with us the results of his extensive, on-the-ground research into the fiscal implications of the energy transition for communities that derive a large share of their public revenue from fossil fuel industries. We also talk through a number of ways fossil-fueled revenues could be replaced by clean energy industries and other policies. We consider the importance of green industrial policy in the equation, and we wrap it up with a speculative discussion about the destiny of fossil fuel communities in the net-zero world of 2050 that we’re striving to reach.
In this final episode of our three-show miniseries on green industrial policy (Episodes #220, #221 and #222), we look at it from the perspective of an economist who has written a book on the subject and advocated for it in the EU.
Dr. Alessio Terzi is an economist with the European Commission who works at the intersection of academia, policy, and think-tanks. He is the author of numerous articles in major news publications, as well as a book, titled Growth for Good.
In today’s conversation, we discuss why technological transformation is the essential pathway to solving our climate problems, and how integral capitalism and growth are to that process. We explore the concept of degrowth and some critiques of conventional capitalism, along with ways that capitalism can be adapted to answer the climate challenge. Finally, Dr. Terzi presents his “blueprint for green capitalism,” offering a nuanced perspective on leveraging economic tools to foster a successful energy transition.
This episode is a thoughtful, 90-minute excursion into economic theory and green industrial policy that aims to answer some of the contemporary questions about the wisdom of using the tools of capitalism and growth to make the energy transition successful.
What causes inflation? And how is it connected to the energy transition?
Standard business press narratives often discuss inflation as if it has a mind of its own, seldom exploring its root causes. However, the connection between inflation and fossil fuel prices is both undeniable and significant. In fact, as you’ll hear at the end of today’s interview, endless interventions by the Fed may be an unavoidable consequence of the energy transition, from now until the project is complete.
So why aren’t we having a conversation about how Putin’s invasion of Ukraine ultimately led to your having to pay more for everything, as inflation was transmitted through from fossil fuels to everything else? Why did Congress give us the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, instead of the Fossil Fuel Reduction Act? And what is the role of the Fed in the energy transition?
In this conversation, climate economist Gernot Wagner of the Columbia Business School rejoins us to help us understand the relationships between fossil fuels and inflation. We discuss why the Fed acts as it does, and we explore the Inflation Reduction Act in the US and the REPowerEU policy package in the EU, and the complex interconnections between monetary policy, industrial policy, and energy policy.
What is the recipe for an energy transition at the scale needed to limit global warming below the crucial 2°C threshold?
Bloomberg journalist Akshat Rathi has identified some of the key ingredients, based on his interviews with ten of the world’s most influential personalities working on climate solutions. In his new book, Climate Capitalism, Akshat recounts their stories and makes a case for how capitalism and the dynamism of the private sector are essential components of the global race to zero emissions.
We take a deep dive into Rathi’s work, confronting the criticisms of capitalism, examining how its varied implementations around the world produce different results, and exploring potential reforms for improvement. We conclude by weaving in some ideas drawn from topics discussed previously on the show, including “command capitalism,” how the energy transition requires long-term planning with a system thinking perspective, and the tension between forces driving for international cooperation versus competition.
It’s a thoughtful look at the state of the global energy transition from someone with a front-row seat to the investment flows around the world, and we know you’ll find it an illuminating and inspiring discussion.
In Episode #209, we peeled back the layers on civilian nuclear power, revealing its history as a facade for the nuclear weapons industry with a corresponding legacy of deception.
Yet, the allure of small modular reactors (SMRs) has recently been touted as the nuclear industry’s saving grace and a beacon of hope with the potential to sidestep a muddled past. Despite all the fanfare and substantial investments, the crumbling of prominent SMR initiatives exposes the continuation of the industry’s tradition of overpromising and underdelivering, a pattern all too familiar to those who’ve been watching closely.
Joining us in this episode is Jim Green from Friends of the Earth Australia, a seasoned nuclear journalist with three decades of experience in critiquing nuclear energy. Jim offers an unparalleled depth of insight into the industry’s persistent shortcomings and the realities behind the SMR hype. Together, we delve into the track record of conventional nuclear power, the latest trends in nuclear plant construction and retirements worldwide, and examine the companies at the forefront of the SMR push, offering a candid exploration of the nuclear power industry’s claims versus its actual performance.
How can we accelerate the decarbonization of the entire US economy?
In this episode, we discuss the energy-related decarbonization strategies outlined in a new report from the National Academies, titled “Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States: Technology, Policy, and Societal Dimensions,” with Dr. Sue Tierney, a Senior Advisor at Analysis Group and a renowned expert in energy and environmental economics, regulation, and policy. Dr. Tierney played a key role in the Committee on Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States, which developed and coordinated this landmark study. We explore how decarbonizing the US requires much more than simply substituting renewables for fossil fuels in power generation and EVs for oil-burning cars. A broad array of solutions must be deployed, but they face numerous barriers and risks to implementation.
Trillions of dollars have been allocated for these energy and technology solutions through three significant laws passed in 2022: the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act. However, effectively mobilizing these funds requires willing collaboration from a diverse group of local, municipal, and state actors, including elected officials, regulators, agency staffers, as well as community and business leaders.
Listen in to learn why delivering a successful energy transition, along with a host of other benefits such as justice, equity, health, jobs, and sustainability writ large, necessitates understanding the barriers to implementation and identifying the types of policies and programs needed to keep the US on track to achieving net zero.
Discussions about energy transition often overlook the crucial role of reducing the energy consumed to maintain comfortable temperatures in the spaces where we live and work. Remarkably, generating heat, the largest end-use of energy, accounts for 40% of global fossil CO2 emissions, with the majority of this heat used in buildings. About half of the energy used in buildings is for their heating and cooling, and because fossil fuels still meet the bulk of heating energy demand, this contributes to about one-fourth of global energy-related carbon emissions annually.
Addressing this challenge by improving building efficiency and reducing thermal losses is arguably the most critical step we can take to facilitate the energy transition. However, strong policies or targeted programs to this end are largely absent worldwide.
A transformative solution is the adoption of the Passivhaus standard for new and existing buildings. Retrofits to meet this standard could drastically reduce energy requirements for buildings, accelerating our progress toward the energy transition.
In this episode, we are joined by Es Tresidder, a Passivhaus consultant who works with an architecture firm to advance the use of the Passivhaus standard and techniques. He walks us through the Passivhaus standard and how to meet it. He also shares the story of the ‘deep retrofit’ performed on his own house in the rainiest and coldest part of Scotland, transforming it into a home that is far healthier and more comfortable, all while significantly reducing its energy consumption.
Following from the December COP28 climate summit, we find ourselves at a pivotal juncture with the world’s governments clearer than ever about “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” Now, what is next for the oil sector and for all of us—the consumers of oil? Is COP’s sweeping announcement setting a ceiling for the global ambition on climate, or merely a floor?
As oil is phased out sector-by-sector, how can the electrification of vehicles handle demand for road transport? And what about the sectors where substitutes are still a work in progress, like petrochemicals, aviation and shipping? Is it really feasible to phase out oil completely, as we discussed with the IEA in the previous episode?
In this episode, we explore these questions with Anand Gopal, the Executive Director of Policy Research at Energy Innovation, an energy transition think tank based in San Francisco. We review the findings from several of Energy Innovation’s recent reports, we discuss the outlook for oil demand, and we get Anand’s first-person observations from this year’s COP.
In December 2023, a landmark declaration emerged from the COP28 climate conference: For the first time, the world’s climate delegates agreed that a global “transition away” from fossil fuels is essential. This historic pronouncement marked a significant shift in tone from previous climate conferences and formalized the energy transition as a global priority, underscoring the urgency of the climate crisis.
But what are the implications for the oil and gas industry? To address this question we turn to the latest analysis from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which has some clear guidance about what must be done to prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures.
In November 2023, Chris traveled to the IEA’s headquarters in Paris, France to discuss their perspectives with two of their lead modelers: Tim Gould, the co-head of the IEA’s World Energy Outlook reports who you’ll remember from Episodes #148 and #171, and Christophe McGlade, the Head of the IEA’s Energy Supply Unit who you’ll remember from Episode #166.
In this 98-minute conversation, we focus on the IEA’s updated outlook for oil and gas, drawing on findings from their World Energy Outlook 2023, their November 2023 oil market report, their updated Net Zero Roadmap, and a new groundbreaking report, The Oil and Gas Industry in Net Zero Transitions. We explore how the energy transition is cutting into demand for oil and gas, and the serious implications for producers. We also show why the industry must pivot to working on energy transition solutions, or prepare for their own obsolescence.
Renowned climate scientist Dr. Michael E. Mann joins us to discuss his new book,
Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis,
and to answer some of the hottest questions in climate science discussions today:
- Are we doomed?
- Is the world facing polar ice breakdown if we reach the same CO2 concentrations that existed in the geological past when the planet was free of ice?
- Is there evidence of “tipping points” in the climate system that will activate “feedback loops” of runaway warming?
- Will the planet keep warming after our carbon emissions go to zero?
- Was the Paris target breached when the world exceed 1.5°C of warming for some months of 2023?
- Are climate scientists using models that underestimate future warming?
- Is there a chance of limiting warming to only 1.5° or 2°C?
It’s been a difficult year for the offshore wind sector, with numerous projects and power purchase agreements getting canceled. Contracts and incentives simply haven’t kept pace with rising costs, forcing developers to shelve money-losing projects.
So is the offshore wind sector hitting a wall, or merely some temporary speed bumps on the path to a bright future?
We’re think it’s the latter, as do industry and government insiders.
In this episode, we take stock of the offshore wind sector, with a focus on the UK. This is our second show based on Chris’ travels to the UK in the Autumn of 2023. The first was Episode #212, about the energy transition on the Isle of Eigg. In this episode, Chris interviews two key players in the UK’s offshore wind industry, and tours a Scottish port, witnessing firsthand the foundations for a new offshore wind project being readied for installation. We also discuss the failure of the UK’s Contract for Difference (CfD) incentive auction for offshore wind this year, and its impact on the offshore wind supply chain. And we conclude with a look at what the government is doing to ensure the next auction is a success.
A small island in Scotland became the world’s first community to launch an off-grid electric system powered by wind, water and solar. Here’s how they did it.
Why do some people believe we should accelerate the energy transition, while others claim that it will never work and advocate for things like degrowth policies instead?
Contra the new pro-nuclear zeitgeist that has bamboozled climate hawks, nuclear power is not at the dawning of a new age, but at the end of its old age.
Contra the new pro-nuclear zeitgeist that has bamboozled climate hawks, nuclear power is not at the dawning of a new age, but at the end of its old age.
Can ancient architectural and building techniques be used today to help keep buildings comfortable without using energy?
Energy researcher Jonathan Koomey rejoins us to review the major stories we have covered over the past year and see how the energy transition has progressed.
Regulatory capture is rife in Texas, and it explains a lot about how the losers of the energy transition have rigged the state’s systems in their favor.
As we have discussed in previous episodes of the show (like Episodes #73, #177, and #198), state regulators and legislators can be ‘captured’ by the industries they are supposed to regulate and wind up serving those industries instead of the public interest.
Usually, regulatory capture is a form of corruption: The system isn’t supposed to work that way, but certain interests can manage to corrupt it. In Texas, however, that kind of capture isn’t a bug—it’s a feature.
In this episode, investigative journalist Russell Gold of Texas Monthly shares what he found after tracking down hundreds of documents scattered across dozens of offices around the state. Not only does the chair of the Texas commission that regulates the oil and gas business personally earn royalties from some of the very oil and gas leases she regulates, so does her family.
We also check in on the progress that Texas is making—and not making—to prevent the kind of grid blackout that happened during the February 2021 big freeze. And we ask where the limits to corruption in Texas actually are, and how rank and file voters in the state feel about it. It’s a sordid story, but an important one to understand, because it reveals a lot about the power of the oil and gas industry in the US.
How can we maximize the role of distributed energy resources as we rebuild the power grid using a decentralized architecture?
What do regulators and governments need to do differently to lead the energy transition?
Why does so much media focus on unlikely, pessimistic climate scenarios when our progress should make us optimistic about combating global warming?
Simon Evans of Carbon Brief reviews the highlights of the UK’s latest policy proposals, including how the government plans to meet its emissions-reduction goals.
In this second part of the interview from Ep. 199, we see how India’s energy transition is changing its oil and gas, grid power, cooling, and mobility sectors.
The Energy Transition Show marks its 200th regular episode with a look back at the progress of the energy transition and of the show since it launched in 2015.
In this first part of a 3.5-hour, two-part interview, we see how India is coming along with its energy transition, with focus on its coal, solar, and wind power.
Why have coal-mining communities continued to white-knuckle their interests in coal long after it was clear the industry was well into decline and would never come back? How were politicians able to misdirect blame toward a “War on Coal” narrative rather than economic factors?
In this episode, Jamie Van Nostrand, a longtime lawyer who has worked both for utility regulators and utility companies, sheds light on these questions. In addition to his current role as a regulator, Jamie has served as a professor of utility law and regulation in several states, including West Virginia, the poster child of coal-industry denial about the energy transition. In Jamie’s 2022 book, The Coal Trap: How West Virginia Was Left Behind in the Clean Energy Revolution, he explains how the politics of West Virginia, and the actions of coal industry proponents and lobbyists, contributed to a culture of denial about the need for a clean energy transition. This denial has come at a great cost to West Virginians, who have missed out on energy transition during a ‘lost decade’ and are now facing unnecessarily high grid power costs for many years ahead. Jamie shares his insights in this episode and explains how the situation in West Virginia can serve as a cautionary tale for other communities facing similar challenges. It’s a fascinating book, and Jamie’s explanations in this extra-long episode are illuminating.
The time may have arrived for Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) to fully realize their potential. In a VPP, groups of distributed energy resources (DERs) like EVs, batteries, and heat pumps can be managed to consume power when it is inexpensive, avoid consuming power when it is expensive, and even provide power back to the grid when supplies are limited.
While VPPs have been around for many years, operating commercially in places like Australia, the US power grid has not seen wide-scale integration. This is now changing because VPPs can help the grid do more with less – supporting new loads without requiring expensive new investments in grid expansion.
In this episode, Jigar Shah, Director of the Loan Programs Office at the US Department of Energy, joins us to share his vision of a much-expanded role for VPPs on the power grid and why he thinks the sector is ready to scale up. You’ll hear how a handful of VPPs and programs to support them have been launched in the US. You’ll also hear how the US Department of Energy is exploring ways to accelerate the development and integration of VPPs, including making financing available through Jigar’s office to support the adoption of VPP-enabled DERs under the Title 17 Clean Energy Financing program.
And because Jigar is with the Department of Energy, sharing information that should be accessible to everyone, we decided to make this one of our occasional lagniappe shows and put it in front of the paywall so that premium and free listeners alike can enjoy it. Hey free listeners, now you can see what you’ve been missing!
Most energy transition reporting narrowly focuses on technology stories. When journalists do occasionally write about energy transition policy and politics, they tend to limit the framing to a particular type of energy technology, such as drilling for oil or putting up a new wind farm.
What if this technological tunnel vision is causing us to overlook the most important aspects of the energy transition? If the most transformative and enduring aspects of transition end up being policy and investment, especially at the local level, these topics rarely get the discussion they deserve. Instead of focusing on flashy technologies like hydrogen and nuclear power, should we also give equal attention to unglamorous solutions like insulation and wider sidewalks? What if the things we need most have no natural champions in industry or political leadership? If so, who will advocate for them?
Our guest in this episode is a researcher who has thought deeply about rebalancing the energy transition conversation. Dr. Marie Claire Brisbois of the University of Sussex draws from her work on power, politics and influence to suggest important changes that we need to make to our institutions of governance and our investment strategies to realize the energy transition’s full potential. It’s a thoughtful, out-of-the-box discussion that will give you much to think about!
Is the Arctic permafrost in a warming feedback loop that will unleash a methane bomb, pushing the planet past a tipping point and into inevitable climate doom?
Not precisely.
But the warming permafrost does release greenhouse gases, and they do matter. Understanding the Arctic permafrost’s role in the global climate cycle is important. And there absolutely is alarming evidence of climate change in the Arctic, to which we must pay attention.
In this episode, permafrost researcher Dr. Gustaf Hugelius of Stockholm University explains what the best scientific evidence says about the thawing of Arctic permafrost and its significance to the climate. We also debunk some of the hyperbolic claims that have been made about it. You’ll learn why, although there are climate feedback loops acting in the Arctic, they are much more predictable and modest in effect than they have been made out to be. You’ll also learn that there are no well-defined “tipping points,” nor is there likely to be a ’methane bomb’ emerging from the permafrost.
So if you’ve been worrying that a tipping point emanating from the Arctic is going to render the whole project of climate action futile, you need to listen to this episode. It’s not so.
Energy transition skeptics continue to argue that certain critical minerals and materials, such as “rare earth” metals, place a fundamental limitation on scaling up wind, solar, storage and EVs. But is that true? Or, are these material availability doubts being expressed as a bad-faith tactic to undermine the momentum toward energy transition success?
Until now, we didn’t have enough information to make a conclusion about the material demands of the transition in the context of resource estimates and production forecasts. But a recent study published in January 2023 has provided some solid answers. A group of researchers estimated future demand for 17 key clean electricity generation materials in climate mitigation scenarios, and compared these projections with available resource estimates. The study also investigated whether there are any concerns about producing enough of these critical materials to meet energy transition demand.
In this episode, one of the authors of the paper, Energy Transition Show alumnus Zeke Hausfather, walks us through the methodology and the findings, gives us the data, and shows why there don’t seem to be any important limits to material availability for the energy transition. We leave no argument unanswered in this discussion, so if you’ve been concerned about mineral availability, you won’t be when you’re done listening to it!
As the European Union and the United States work toward stronger climate policies, their two divergent approaches are creating tension. The EU has opted for a mix of rewards and penalties to incentivize green industries while also taxing carbon emissions from domestic industries – a “carrots and sticks” approach. On the other hand, the US is only offering rewards because Congress can’t assemble a sufficient majority to agree on taxing carbon emissions from its industries; in other words, a carrots-only approach.
These contrasting approaches to climate policy have agitated trade discussions between the US and Europe, as shown by the recent passage of the $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act in the US, which European leaders worry might make their trade position weaker.
But another policy is now rising to the forefront as a source of trade tension: Europe’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (or CBAM), which will impose tariffs on goods imported to Europe based on their embedded carbon emissions. The CBAM works to prevent “carbon leakage” by ensuring that European producers who pay carbon taxes won’t be disadvantaged compared to others who don’t.
In this conversation, we are joined by Noah Kaufman, an economist and research scholar at SIPA’s Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University who served in the White House under both President Biden and President Obama, to discuss the challenges of accounting for the embedded carbon emissions in various goods, as well as how the EU and the US can find common ground and harmonize their climate policies.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 introduced two tax credits to encourage the development of a domestic clean hydrogen industry in the United States. These tax credits can potentially be worth billions of dollars and are based on a sliding scale, depending on how ‘clean’ the hydrogen production is. The less greenhouse gas emitted during production, the larger the tax credit.
However, measuring and accounting for the greenhouse gas emissions from a hydrogen production facility can be complicated, especially when the electrolyzer producing the hydrogen is in a different location on the power grid from the renewable power plant that powers it. So complicated that you pretty much have to be a grid power expert to even begin figuring these calculations out.
To address such sticky questions of hydrogen production tax credit eligibility, the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requested comments to shape how they will measure and account for related emissions. One of the respondents was the San Francisco-based clean energy think-tank Energy Innovation, which submitted a very thoughtful, 25-page response outlining some of the key issues the IRS should understand, the criteria it should consider, and some policy recommendations, as well suggestions for preventing attempts to game the tax credit system.
In this highly technical episode, we welcome back to the show Eric Gimon, one of the Energy Innovation authors, to review their response to the IRS. And this discussion reveals not just how to ensure that the billions of dollars of tax credits will go to projects that actually reduce emissions, but also important insights about everything from how we go about building new renewable power plants, to the varying carbon intensity of the power grid, to the business case for building electrolyzers to produce green hydrogen.
Since 2007 the US transitioned from an oil production has-been that was more than four decades past its previous peak, to the world’s top oil and gas producer, and the top exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG). The shale boom delivered many benefits to the US and the world, including over a decade of reprieve from the impending threat of peak oil.
But now shale producers face numerous challenges — such as running out of decent prospects where they can drill new wells.
The implications of the US shale boom winding down are as numerous as the benefits, and it’s vitally important we understand how this shift will influence the world oil market and shape the entire project of the energy transition.
In this episode, we are joined by longtime oil journalist Derek Brower, the US Energy Editor for the Financial Times, who has been a frontline reporter through the shale boom’s entire story. We recount the history of how the US fracked its shales to become the leading oil producer, and how a decade of volatile oil prices has changed the character of the oil industry, as well as the various ways we use oil. We’ll also review the headwinds the shale industry now faces and why its prospects for additional growth are dim. And we’ll consider what the end of the shale boom means for the global oil trade and its geopolitics; for the ongoing efforts to eliminate demand for Russian oil in the West; and for the energy transition as a whole.
Multilateral development banks (MDBs) like the World Bank are increasingly under pressure to invest more in renewable energy projects in emerging markets. The lack of financing for such projects is a problem at the small, distributed scale as we discussed in Episode #189, and it’s also a problem for utility-scale projects as we discuss in this episode.
In this conversation, Brad Handler, a Program Manager and Researcher at the Sustainable Finance Lab of the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines who tracks various such projects and initiatives, walks us through some recent Energy Transition Mechanisms (or ETMs) and Just Energy Transition (or JET) refinancing projects that aim to close coal plants in the developing world long before the end of their expected lifespans, and replace their generation with renewable power. A former Wall Street Equity Research Analyst with 20 years of experience covering the oil sector, Brad has a deep understanding of how finance in the traditional energy sector works, giving him an excellent perspective on how energy transition financing could work. He does a wonderful job of explaining the oftentimes opaque and complex world of sustainable finance so that it’s comprehensible.
Closing coal plants remains the number-one priority globally for reducing carbon emissions. So although these are still very early days for refinancing projects, it’s worthwhile to examine how and where development banks are finally taking some real steps to accelerate the energy transition in emerging economies, derisking the sector and motivating much more conventional private sector capital to participate.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), almost all of the growth in global clean energy spending is happening in advanced economies and China, while the two-thirds of the global population that live in emerging market and developing economies are receiving less than one-fifth of the total. The reason? The high cost of capital.
But why is the cost of capital so much higher in emerging economies than in advanced economies? Why is it still so much harder and more expensive to finance clean energy projects than it is to finance fossil fuel projects in those countries? And what can be done about it?
In this episode, we speak with a solar project developer working in Costa Rica to try to answer these questions. Building on our previous discussion from Episode #21, we try to explain why so little progress has been made, especially by the multilateral development banks (like the World Bank), in reducing the cost of financing for renewable energy projects in emerging economies. We review the different roles that various financial institutions play in financing the energy transition, and we ask what needs to change to unlock the flow of capital into energy transition solutions (especially distributed solar). We also put the risk and reward of investing in those projects in a fresh context, and call upon banks of all kinds to start acting in more creative and ambitious ways to take bolder action and get capital deployed where it is most needed, and where it can do the most good.
How much of a role might wind, solar, nuclear, transmission, power plants equipped with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, or direct air capture of CO2 play on a 100% clean power grid? Which mix of those technologies would provide the cheapest pathways to a clean grid?
And once we have met 90% of the need for grid power with clean generation, what will we need to meet the last 10% of the demand for grid power? Will it be ‘overbuilt’ wind and solar? Dispatchable geothermal, hydropower, and bioenergy generators? Seasonal storage using hydrogen or batteries? Conventional fossil-fueled plants with CO2 capture? Or might it be some mix of flexible demand technologies? Or some or all of the above?
For that matter, how certain can we even be about modeling the possible solutions years or even decades ahead? Are there solutions that might play a large role in the future but that we can’t yet model very well? How confident should we be that whatever the solutions turn out to be, we will end up with not only a grid that is completely free of carbon emissions but also one that is fully reliable?
In this episode, we speak with a senior researcher at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) who has been researching and modeling grid power for many years. In this quite technical discussion, we review two new NREL reports that address these questions and show that producing a 100% clean power grid is not only technically feasible by a variety of pathways but also commercially feasible and ultimately, cheaper than continuing to run the fossil-fueled power grid we have today.
This is Part 2 of the first series in a new format we are piloting for the Energy Transition Show. Instead of exploring a particular topic with one guest who has a non-commercial perspective, as most of our shows so far have done, this new format aims to tell the stories about how the energy transition is proceeding in some of the places Chris visits in his travels. Through interviews with multiple local experts, including those who are working in the energy sector, we hope this new format will help to demonstrate how the unique challenges and opportunities in every place will determine its particular path through the energy transition.
We are kicking off this new show format with some stories about Vermont for a simple reason: When it comes to the energy transition, Vermont stands out as a place that punches way above its weight. It has innovated numerous policies and mechanisms to reduce its energy consumption and carbon emissions that have been emulated by other US states. And it continues to serve as a model to the rest of the country for effective energy transition strategies.
You’ll learn more about all of these accomplishments, as well as what makes Vermont such an exemplar in the energy transition, in this two-part miniseries based on interviews with eight local experts.
Part 1 was in Episode #186, in which we discussed the supply side of Vermont’s energy picture. In this second part, we look at the demand side.
Interviews with guests featured in this episode were recorded from October 11-15, 2021.
This show tells the story of the supply side of energy in Vermont, based on interviews with local experts in October 2021.
Can we coordinate replacing fossil-fueled assets with clean, zero-carbon assets so that both systems remain functional and affordable during the transition?
Is the Energy Returned on Investment (EROI) of renewable energy high enough to power our modern world?
How is the world managing the ongoing global energy crisis, and why is the energy transition the only real path out of it?
Energy researcher Jonathan Koomey rejoins us to review the major stories we have covered over the past year and see how the energy transition has progressed.
Energy researcher Jonathan Koomey rejoins us to review the major stories we have covered over the past year and see how the energy transition has progressed.
Can free-market capitalism survive the energy transition? Or are we entering a new era of “command capitalism?”
Can free-market capitalism survive the energy transition? Or are we entering a new era of “command capitalism?”
What are the challenges and opportunities for energy transition in Alberta, and can it make a successful pivot away from its traditional fossil fuel industry?
What are the challenges and opportunities for energy transition in Alberta, and can it make a successful pivot away from its traditional fossil fuel industry?
How much clean energy could offshore wind provide in the US, and what do we need to do to develop the offshore wind sector?
How much clean energy could offshore wind provide in the US, and what do we need to do to develop the offshore wind sector?
Can we confidently undertake the energy transition without knowing exactly all the answers or where the journey will take us?
Can we confidently undertake the energy transition without knowing exactly all the answers or where the journey will take us?
Many utilities are actively working against the energy transition and abusing their monopoly power, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Many utilities are actively working against the energy transition and abusing their monopoly power, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
How well do integrated assessment models reflect the trajectory of the energy transition, and how can we make their scenarios more useful to policymakers?
How well do integrated assessment models reflect the trajectory of the energy transition, and how can we make their scenarios more useful to policymakers?
What motivates people to accept or reject a proposal to build a new renewable energy facility in their communities?
How National Grid ESO, Great Britain’s transmission network operator, is enhancing its grid to ensure stability while integrating more variable renewable power.
What does the IPCC Working Group III report say about the energy transition pathways and probabilities to limiting warming to 1.5 and 2°C? Part 2 of 2.
What does the IPCC Working Group III report say about the energy transition pathways and probabilities to limiting warming to 1.5 and 2°C? Part 1 of 2.
How can the West stop funding the war on Ukraine by reducing their imports of Russia’s fossil fuels and minerals, and accelerating the energy transition?
Could thermal storage meet much of the demand for energy in a high-renewables future, and radically reduce the expected need for battery storage?
Has the world ever transitioned from one fuel to another as quickly as we need to do this transition in order to meet our climate targets?
How much and what kinds of storage will be needed as variable renewables become more dominant on the power grid, and when and where will it be needed?
How are green bonds evaluated and rated to ensure that they’re really green and will have an impact on climate change?
How can the world align with the IEA’s scenarios for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, and how should the oil & gas industry proceed in the energy transition?
What is the outlook for oil and gas, and how will the world manage the supply/demand balance as the energy transition proceeds?
What is the political economy of energy transitions, and what do we need to understand about it in order to make the energy transition a success?
In this second part of a two-part interview, we look at Russia’s gas, coal, nuclear, and renewables, and ask how it will fare as the energy transition proceeds.
In this first part of a two-part interview, we talk with Professor Thane Gustafson about Russia’s oil sector.
What needs to happen to get new transmission projects moving in the US, and how can the provisions of the new infrastructure law help?
How can the world shut down the coal industry faster and more equitably, while delivering the best outcomes for the public?
A new approach to energy forecasting finds that the energy transition is feasible, affordable, and most importantly, inevitable.
A global energy crunch is driving up the costs of all energy sources. But will it lead to renewed energy transition efforts, or reneging on climate commitments?
What are some of the reforms that can make electricity markets more friendly to the technologies and needs of the energy transition?
Energy researcher Jonathan Koomey rejoins us to review some of the major themes in energy transition over the past year.
What is the state of marine energy technologies, and how can we capture marine energy sustainably and safely while minimizing environmental damage?
It’s been a decade since the Fukushima nuclear disaster, but the future of Japan’s energy sector remains murky. We try to clarify it in this episode.
How can inverter-based resources integrate with synchronous generators as renewables become dominant on power grids? And is system inertia even necessary?
Will the energy transition be limited by the availability of land, or key minerals, or the cost of renewables? And how will it affect economic growth?
This is Volume 1 of the Best of the Energy Transition Show, compiled from our five most popular shows of the past two years.
What does “resilient” and “reliable” grid power mean from the perspective of grid planning, and what should bulk power system operators do to ensure it?
What carbon price is needed for Europe’s Emissions Trading System to make green hydrogen a viable part of meeting its goals under the Paris agreement?
What trajectory of global energy consumption and carbon emissions can we expect as the world starts to recover from the COVID pandemic? How much will energy consumption and emissions rebound, and what climate path are we now on?
In this first part of a two-part interview, we look at the global expectations for and production of hydrogen, and its potential role in energy transition.
In this first part of a two-part interview, we look at the global expectations for and production of hydrogen, and its potential role in energy transition.
In this first part of a two-part interview, we look at the global expectations for and production of hydrogen, and its potential role in energy transition.
In this first part of a two-part interview, we look at the global expectations for and production of hydrogen, and its potential role in energy transition.
In this first part of a two-part interview, we look at the global expectations for and production of hydrogen, and its potential role in energy transition.
In this first part of a two-part interview, we look at the global expectations for and production of hydrogen, and its potential role in energy transition.
How should we design climate policies so they really reduce emissions, and why have carbon market strategies mostly failed?
What is vehicle-grid integration, how are electric vehicles charged, and what are some of the best practices for managing EV loads on utility grids?
What is vehicle-grid integration, how are electric vehicles charged, and what are some of the best practices for managing EV loads on utility grids?
Is China the greatest threat to the global climate, or our greatest hope for energy transition?
What will the Biden-Harris administration mean for America’s energy transition, its relationship with the rest of the world, and for global action on climate?
To what extent will economics and fundamental limits of energy resources guide and control the progress of energy transition?
What risks does climate change pose to the financial sector and to various markets, and how should we recognize and internalize those risks?
Battery storage has grown ten-fold in the US over the past five years, but the storage sector is still just getting started.
Investors need to reduce their exposure to fossil fuel assets as the world starts taking action on climate change.
How did the solar industry get to where it is today, and what does the future hold for it?
According to modeling by the UN, decarbonizing the economy of the United States, and getting to net-zero emissions by 2050, is not only possible but affordable.
Jonathan Koomey returns to the show for another freewheeling discussion about some of the interesting developments in energy transition over the past year.
What are the policies that the US needs to pursue in order to achieve its decarbonization targets?
In this part of our Energy Basics mini-series, we review the evolution of the electricity industry, and explain how wholesale and retail power markets work.
What are the solutions to reducing carbon emissions from the “hard-to-decarbonize” sectors that make industrial civilization possible?
These episodes are part of our mini-series on the energy basics, and explain some of the essential concepts in electricity, including what electricity is, how we generate it, and how we manage power grids.
Why did the new film, Planet of the Humans, get so much about the energy transition wrong, and what are its filmmakers really trying to say?
Will progress on the energy transition continue as the world gets back to work, or will it falter thanks to economies under pressure and vast unemployment?
What does “sustainability” really mean in the context of energy transition? We review a new textbook that explores these complex questions.
Why are utility-scale wind and solar farms increasingly being paired with integrated battery storage systems, and is that really the best way to deploy storage?
What are the winning (and losing) tactics in crafting policy to support energy transition, and what do advocates need to do to win?
How much damage has the oil industry suffered from the coronavirus shutdown, how will it recover, and what are the implications for energy transition?
These first three episodes in our mini-series on the energy basics explain some of the essential concepts and terms in energy, including what energy is, why we convert it, and how we use it.
The Energy Transition Show joins up with The Interchange for our first ever crossover episode!
Two energy analysts ask an integrated assessment modeler to explain why the IPCC’s climate scenarios don’t seem to represent the progress of energy transition.
Two energy analysts ask an integrated assessment modeler to explain why the IPCC’s climate scenarios don’t seem to represent the progress of energy transition.
How is Australia dealing with the reality of climate change in this season of hugely destructive wildfires, and what is the outlook for its energy transition?
What does cybersecurity on the grid mean, and what does it have to do with energy transition and climate change?
Fully-regulated utilities can choose to operate their plants at a loss when regulators give them a way to pass those losses onto their customers.
How likely are the various scenarios for global warming, what do they mean, and where is the current trajectory for climate change likely to take us?
Transitioning to renewables, and moving heating and transportation to the power grid, will save everyone money while reducing emissions.
The transition to electric vehicles powered by renewables is all but guaranteed by the massive energetic advantage they have over conventional oil-burning vehicles.
Exxon was doing some of the best research on climate change 40 years ago. Why did they then commit to a global climate disinformation campaign?
Fossil fuel incumbents think energy transition will be gradual, while the disruptors think it will be rapid. What can we learn from these contrasting narratives?
Energy transition is complex, and understanding it requires expertise in multiple disciplines, so a group of Stanford researchers proposes to study it that way.
South Africa could be one of the world’s greatest success stories in energy transition if it can shed its apartheid-era legacy of coal dependency.
Jonathan Koomey returns to the show for another freewheeling discussion about some of the interesting developments over the past year in energy transition.
Unless energy transition is wildly successful, the world will have no choice but to depend on local resources when oil production begins its inevitable decline.
The energy transition provides some of the answers to wildfire risk, including how utilities deal with their own culpability.
In this wide-ranging chat, Chris Nelder and Jonathan Koomey talk about the many things we don’t know about how the energy transition will proceed.
For our 100th episode, we thought we’d do a little something special: Interview professors from four US universities who are using the Energy Transition Show as coursework, and make the full show available to everyone, including non-subscribers. We ask these teachers about the specific topics they’re teaching, how they’re using the show in their classes, what concepts students find difficult, what misconceptions students have about energy, and how students are reacting to having study materials in podcast form. We also talk with two of the professors about their new energy transition textbooks, which are being published this year.
Is the supply of certain key metals—like lithium, copper, nickel, and cobalt—and “rare earth” metals—like vanadium and indium—potentially a limiter on the progress of energy transition? Or is there enough of them to realize our ambitions? Are they being produced in a sustainable way? How will the geographic concentration of these metals affect geopolitics and trade as the energy transition progresses? How confident can we be about our assessments of their abundance? And how confident can we be about how much of them we’ll need in the future, given the rapid evolution of many of these technologies, and the many alternate ways of producing them?
Our guest in this episode brings all of these questions into a whole new focus, and shows why these questions can’t be answered with some back-of-the-envelope calculation. Instead of asking whether there is enough of these metals in the Earth’s crust, he says, or about how they are mined, we should be asking much more sophisticated questions about the chemical industry, the opaque, illiquid markets in which these metals are traded, and the geopolitical implications of their trade.
Building high voltage transmission lines has never been easy, but now it’s arguably both harder than ever, and more necessary than ever, as we seek to unlock the vast potential of wind and solar in the US and ship it to major population centers. But it’s not a business for the faint of heart, as we’ll hear in this incredible story by award-winning investigative reporter and author Russell Gold of the Wall Street Journal. His new book, Superpower, chronicles the story of Michael Skelly, a developer who spent a decade and a great deal of money trying to build five major transmission lines in the US to support the burgeoning wind industry, only to be undermined, deceived, shot down, and ultimately driven to giving up, by people who opposed the lines for their own selfish interests. It’s an amazing story and a great cautionary tale for any prospective transmission line developer, as well as a wellspring of crucial insights that will benefit all who work in energy transition.
As we continue looking for ways to decarbonize our energy systems, we often have to decide whether it’s better to try reworking our market rules so that the markets will do a better job of procuring clean energy, as we discussed in Episode #90, or whether it makes sense to just mandate the procurement of clean energy resources. The former is a job for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), but the latter is the domain of the states. In fact, our guest in this episode, a senior attorney with NRDC and the Sustainable FERC Project, argues that because states are really the only ones with the authority to regulate energy in order to obtain a more environmentally beneficial outcome and combat climate change, their mandates are a necessary pathway to decarbonizing the grid. And that, to some extent, market price distortion is in the mind of the beholder.
Energy transition is happening quickly and disruptively in the transportation sector. But it is generally an open question whether the transition currently at hand is producing socially beneficial results. As we grapple with a sudden influx of new modes of mobility and business models, and contemplate the dawning of an entirely new mobility paradigm, are we just letting technology take us wherever it wants to go, or are we guiding technologies toward sustainable mobility? For that matter, what does sustainable mobility even mean? How can we weigh up all the pros and cons of new mobility modes—not just the social effects like safety and equity, but the environmental impacts, the total impact on the energy system, and the socioeconomic strategies we bring to our urban development and civic planning activities more generally? Can we hedge our bets against sudden and massive dislocations produced by autonomous vehicles? We explore all those questions and more in this episode with a researcher from Oxford University who has studied them deeply.
Can we run the world on renewables alone? Various researchers have tried to model how a given country might run a grid using mostly renewables, oftentimes finding that carbon-negative technologies, advanced nuclear power, and even coal power plants equipped with CCS will be a part of the solution set. But no one has produced a comprehensive model that shows how we can run the world on renewables alone, while accurately modeling the weather and grid conditions at a very discrete scale, at hourly resolution, using data on the renewable resources in each region, and determining how that would work while selecting the least-cost resources… until now.
In this episode we speak with a researcher from Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland, one of an international team of 14 scientists who have spent the past four and a half years performing research, data analysis, and technical and financial modeling to prove that a global transition to 100% renewable energy is economically competitive with the current fossil and nuclear-based system, and could reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the energy system to zero even before 2050. This first-of-its-kind study outlines how the world could limit warming to 1.5°C with a cost-effective, global, 100% renewable energy system that does not use negative carbon technologies, and provides all the energy needed for electricity, heat, transport and desalination by 2050.
As more distributed energy resources arrive unbidden onto the power grid, they are increasingly requiring us not to just think about new utility business models, but to radically rethink what a utility might look like. What if millions of distributed resources become the dominant resources, and the grid assumes a subordinate role as a residual supplier of energy? What if the control of the system is also decentralized, through the actions of millions of devices? What if the roles of transmission system operators and the distribution system are diminished as their responsibilities are distributed across all those devices? And how will utilities, power market operators, regulators, legislators, and local officials deal with a radical shift in their roles and responsibilities? These are the questions that our guest in this episode—an 18-year veteran of wholesale power market design at the California ISO—thinks about, and he shares those deep thoughts with us in this wonky yet heady discussion.
This is Part 2 of our two-and-a-half hour interview with Tim Buckley, of the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, based in Australia. We featured Part 1 in Episode 91, in which we primarily discussed the future of coal fired power in India. In this second part, we expand on the India story and look more broadly at energy transition across Southeast Asia, and consider the outlook for coal, renewables, and nuclear power in China, Japan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Malaysia, among others. As he did in Part 1, Tim shares with us in this episode a fascinating set of data on the future of energy in Southeast Asia that is oftentimes at sharp variance with the projections that we hear from energy watchdogs like the International Energy Agency. Tim tells a much more hopeful story about energy transition in the developing world. For example: If you think that China’s building more coal plants means that its coal consumption is going to go up, think again! Energy transition is moving ahead, and will move ahead, much more quickly in Southeast Asia than any of our major agencies project, and that is great news for the climate.
The coal power sector in the US is continuing to shrink due to poor economics, but this doesn’t mean we’re retiring coal fired power plants quickly enough to reduce carbon emissions at a rate that achieves our climate goals. So what’s the best way to get rid of coal plants before they reach the end of their expected lifespans, particularly while the Trump administration and the Republican party continue trying to find ways to keep coal plants open? Democratic state Representative Chris Hansen of Colorado has proposed a solution: Refinancing the debt that utilities still owe on their coal-fired plants with cheaper, public bonds, and then shutting down the plants. It’s an idea that would retire coal plants and reduce carbon emissions, save utility customers money, create better investment opportunities for the utilities, and replace that power with cheaper, clean, solar and wind power. Everybody wins! It’s a powerful idea whose time may have come in Colorado, where fossil fuels still make up 78% of the state’s electricity mix, and major utilities in the state, like Xcel Energy, have declared their intention to transition to 100% clean power in the coming decades. Will Hansen’s bill have the right approach to help achieve those goals? We dive into all the important details in this episode and find out!
It has long been assumed that India, China, and other developing countries of Southeast Asia would power their vigorous economic growth for decades to come with coal. We heard over and over that China is building a new coal-fired power plant every three days, and about plans for multi-gigawatt sized coal-fired power plants in India. As long as coal was the cheapest form of power, addressing our climate emergency seemed like a lost hope.
But that nightmare is now evaporating thanks to the continuously declining costs for solar, wind, and battery storage. Although there are far too few policymakers (not to mention the major energy agencies, like EIA and IEA) who appear to be aware of it, the future of coal is fading by the day, as solar and wind take the lead as the lowest cost forms of power. And nowhere is this new reality more starkly evident than in India, where a remarkable pivot away from coal has been under way for about five years now, radically reshaping the outlook for India’s energy consumption, and stranding billions of dollars in investments in coal plants that will not be used as expected. At the same time, India is busily electrifying 18,000 villages, pushing forward on the electrification of transportation, and developing demand-side technologies that together are more likely to make India one of the world’s great success stories in energy transition than one of the world’s largest upcoming carbon emitters.
Our guest in this episode has been closely watching these markets for three decades, and is one of the sharpest observers of what’s happening in India and Southeast Asia. This episode is Part One of our two-and-a-half hour conversation with him, which mostly covers India and coal. Part Two of this interview will be featured in Episode 93.
This one is for the grid geeks! With the Green New Deal now a hot topic in the US Congress, while wholesale power markets still struggle to figure out how to accommodate new kinds of resources even as coal plants and nuclear plants continue to retire, the question of how wholesale power markets should work, and how they should value new kinds of assets and services, is becoming increasingly urgent. What would a power market look like if it consisted mainly (or totally) of wind and solar, with their zero-marginal-cost power? And if we continue to use out-of-market payments to keep clean but uneconomic nuclear plants operating, what will be the effect on power markets? Will power markets ultimately crash under the weight of accumulated patches and workarounds, or can their design be adapted to new social priorities—like combating climate change—and new kinds of resources, like large-scale storage systems? Can we replace the market construct of locational marginal pricing with something more suited to the new reality of grid power? What kind of policies can keep us on track to support transition and facilitate the evolution of the fuel and technology mix toward a high renewables future? Will FERC Order 841 succeed in opening the doors to storage on the grid? Are real-time prices the future of rate design? And as we move toward a deeply decarbonized grid, what are the implications for our economic system?
In this episode, we delve into all those questions and more with an expert who has worked on power markets for over 30 years.
What kinds of energy solutions can really improve the health of people in developing countries, and how can energy transition support them?
The global energy trade is enormously complex, and its geopolitical implications are vast, but they are only made more complex by energy transition. If the US exports gas to Europe and Asia, might you expect it to largely displace coal in their power plants? Think again! What will be the geopolitical ramifications on our relationship with Russia, as we send more of our gas to China and India? And as the US weans itself off of coal, and seeks to export more coal abroad, will it be stymied by energy transition in foreign countries, as well as political impediments at home?
And what of US “energy independence?” Does it mean that the US is actually self-sufficient in energy, or even just in fossil fuels, in the sense that we may not need imports anymore? And what is the value of it anyway, especially if it also means increased dependence on export markets abroad?
Tune in as we explore some of the fascinating questions about the implications of energy transition on energy trade in this interview, and be prepared to be surprised by some of our guest’s answers!
If utility-scale solar plants could be made to run more flexibly, they could avoid curtailment and play an even larger role in grid power supply.
Are investments in energy transition worth it, or do things like the rebound effect and dirty power grids nullify their value?
The best way to build a renewably-powered microgrid using foreign aid in Africa may be exactly the opposite of what you’d expect.
We talk with an author of Designing Climate Solutions about the best policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and how to design them.
How is Germany’s Energiewende (energy transition) coming along, why did they decide to phase out nuclear at a time like this, and when will they get off coal?
Can a large corporation, especially one involved in heavy industry like mining, use more renewable energy and become more sustainable? Ingersoll Rand thinks so.
Dr. David Murphy of St. Lawrence University interviews Chris about principles of energy transition, live from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.
Forget buying HVAC and lighting systems for your commercial buildings. Building infrastructure-as-a-service offers an exciting new path to energy transition.
Community choice aggregations (CCAs) are rapidly taking over power procurement in California and elsewhere, with both advantages and concerns to consider.
Veteran energy researcher Jonathan Koomey rejoins us for our 3rd anniversary show covering a wide range of topics related to energy transition.
Robyn Beavers shares some of her insights from a 15-year career in energy transition. How did we get here, and what’s next?
Europe is about to fix its cap and trade system for carbon emissions. But will carbon prices rise high enough to meet the Paris targets?
Is the transition of transportation to electric vehicles good for society, or just a new set of problems? We explore some common questions in this episode.
Can behavioral changes and better delivery of services help us limit global warming to 1.5 °C without relying on negative emission technologies like CCS?
How can we ensure that utility regulators aren’t unduly influenced by the companies they’re supposed to regulate as we proceed with the energy transition?
What’s next for solar, as it becomes the cheapest form of new power generation? Do we still need solar advocates and incentives, or can it now stand on its own?
Australia is at the cutting edge of energy transition, with the world’s largest grid battery and rapidly replacing coal with renewables. How are they doing it?
Contests over the control of wholesale markets are a core feature of energy transition and raise complex legal questions, which we explore in this episode.
If 13 US states and parts of Canada and Mexico were to join the California ISO system, how would it affect power markets across the West?
How can we count the uncountable in energy transition, and turn it into relevant data that can inform climate policy?
What do disruptive companies like oil and gas frackers and Tesla have in common, and what can they tell us about energy transition? Part 2 of 2.
What do disruptive companies like oil and gas frackers and Tesla have in common, and what can they tell us about energy transition? Part 1 of 2.
The changing jet stream is associated with many of the extreme weather events in recent years, and tree-ring data shows that climate change is to blame.
Energy expert Eric Gimon answers questions submitted by Energy Transition Show subscribers.
As we transfer loads from transportation and space heating over to renewably-powered electricity, will we discover a limit to the “electrify everything” mantra?
How did utilities in the South squander more than $40 billion on failed nuclear and coal plants, and how can such boondoggles be prevented in the future?
How should we value storage services? Will CSP and EVs change the grid? How can machine learning and data analytics accelerate energy transition?
How does utility resource procurement need to adapt to a changing world? Can wholesale markets survive the transition to more distributed resources? Is there a risk of becoming too dependent on natural gas to provide grid balancing services? And how does storage may need to be valued in order to fulfill its greatest potential on the grid?
Why motivates students in the Energy and Environment program at Duke, what topics do they find the most challenging, and why are they interested in energy transition?
How well do we understand the melting of our glaciers and ice caps, and how much sea levels might rise as a result…and when?
How can artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the Internet of Things turn demand flexibility into a core grid asset and displace fossil fuels?
What is lifecycle assessment, and how can it help us choose between various energy options during the transition? NREL’s Garvin Heath explains.
NREL’s Paul Denholm explains how solar + storage systems participate in wholesale electricity markets, and when they can compete with natural gas peaker plants.
What do carbon budgets really say about the future warming of the planet, and how much warming should we expect? Climate scientist Dr. Glen Peters explains.
Could the blockchain be a powerful new enabler of energy transition, or is it just another overhyped solution in search of a problem?
How can we maintain stable voltage and frequency on the power grid as we replace conventional synchronous generators with wind and solar?
When humanity’s demands exceed Earth’s ability to satisfy them, is energy transition even possible? Father of ecological footprint analysis Bill Rees explains.
In space heating, “deep decarbonization” is about a lot more than just swapping old furnaces. It requires a complete understanding of human health and comfort.
For our two-year anniversary, we discuss some of the most interesting questions in energy transition today. And Chris muses on the lessons of Hurricane Harvey.
How does the IPCC climate modeling process work, and does any of it project a successful energy transition happening this century?
To realize our renewable energy potential in the U.S., we’ll need more long-distance transmission lines. But there are a lot of obstacles, which we’ll discuss
How should we think about the influence of the global energy system on the climate over the next century?
How does the carbon cycle work, and what’s its relationship to global warming? And what are the most effective ways of teaching climate science?
Claude Turmes, a 15-year Member of the European Parliament, relates the history of Europe’s energy transition policies and his hopes for the future.
Can we run the world on 100% renewables? Is that even the right goal? A new critique of Prof. Mark Jacobson’s work on 100% renewables offers some insights.
What can the history of Earth’s climate tell us about its future, and what is the relationship between climate change and the economy?
Each state and country has its own unique set of resources and energy transition challenges, so there are different speeds and techniques for each one.
What is PURPA and why are utilities trying to change it in their fight against solar? What are the legal issues in around-market reforms?
Is the net energy of renewables high enough to actually power human civilization? Or will low EROIs doom energy transition?
Utility Dive editor Gavin Bade explains how independent power producers are using around-market reforms and re-regulation to survive energy transition.
This deep dive into ocean science reveals how we take the Earth’s temperature, the truth about the “Climategate” business, and the “Pausebuster” paper.
How will Australia manage its energy transition, with both the most residential rooftop solar PV per capita, and the second-dirtiest power grid in the world?
What are the hard problems and interesting questions on the road to energy transition, and what are their solutions? An astronaut and professor has answers.
Corporations have emerged as some of the top buyers of renewable electricity, even buying it from wind and solar farms in other states. But why are they doing that when they could just buy grid power? And how do “virtual PPAs” work, anyway? Erin Craig has the answers.
We discuss the current state of climate science and rebut the arguments of climate change skeptics, and look ahead to what must be done to halt climate change.
What are green bonds, and how can they help mobilize private capital to fund energy transition and climate change mitigation measures? What kinds of things can green bonds be used to fund? What are the various roles for private, corporate, and sovereign issuers? Why does the green bond market need to grow by roughly 10x over the next few years to $1 trillion a year globally, and is there even enough capital out there willing to accept single-digit returns to buy that amount of green bonds? Are green bonds an answer to the stranded assets problem in the fossil fuel sector? And what can the appetite for green bonds tell us about monetary policy and appropriate discount rates for climate change mitigation measures? We get deep into all of these questions with the CEO of the Climate Bonds Initiative, an international NGO working to mobilize debt capital markets for climate solutions.
This is a special, free "extra" episode recorded at RMI’s eLab Annual Summit in December 2016 in Austin, Texas.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) based in Golden, Colorado provides a wide range of research, guidance, and policy support to the whole government stack in the U.S., from the local and city level all the way up to the federal and tribal level. From supporting the rebuild of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to informing policies with things like calculating the Value of Solar (VOS) and figuring out better ways of doing demand response, NREL is helping to lead the way on energy transition. We interview Elizabeth Doris of NREL at RMI’s eLab Summit 2016.
Disclaimer
The views, opinions, and positions expressed by the author and those providing comments on these podcasts are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of Rocky Mountain Institute or any employee thereof.
This is a special, free "extra" episode recorded at RMI’s eLab Annual Summit in December 2016 in Austin, Texas.
Should utilities be allowed to own EV charging infrastructure, or should that be reserved for private charging companies? How many Level 3 high-voltage chargers do we need at workplaces and shopping areas? And how do we build charging infrastructure now that won’t become stranded assets if and when we transition to fleets of autonomous vehicles? We interview Jonathan Levy of Vision Ridge Partners at RMI’s eLab Summit 2016 to find out.
Disclaimer
The views, opinions, and positions expressed by the author and those providing comments on these podcasts are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of Rocky Mountain Institute or any employee thereof.
This is a special, free "extra" episode recorded at RMI’s eLab Annual Summit in December 2016 in Austin, Texas.
Through a variety of programs, Austin Energy, the eighth largest publicly-owned electric utility in the U.S., has led the way to an EV future in Texas, installing the first EV charging infrastructure in the region, offering rebates for installing charging stations and the ability to charge up at 250 charging stations throughout the city for a low flat rate using 100% renewable energy. Karl Popham, the Electric Vehicle & Emerging Technologies Manager at Austin Energy, explains how he did it and what other similarly positioned utility leaders can do in an interview from RMI’s eLab Annual Summit 2016.
Disclaimer
The views, opinions, and positions expressed by the author and those providing comments on these podcasts are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of Rocky Mountain Institute or any employee thereof.
This is a special, free "extra" episode recorded at RMI’s eLab Annual Summit in December 2016 in Austin, Texas.
What are some of the ways that New York is building its resilience capacity while executing its Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) energy transition plan, particularly as a response to the damage it suffered in Superstorm Sandy? Is it possible to have a successful energy transition without also securing justice and equity, particularly for the underserved and disadvantaged among us? And what is the future for energy transition in the U.S. in the era of President Trump? Eleanor Stein of America’s Power Plan, who was Project Manager for New York’s REV initiative, shares her insights from a lifetime of work on climate and justice issues at RMI’s eLab Annual Summit 2016.
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Disclaimer
The views, opinions, and positions expressed by the author and those providing comments on these podcasts are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of Rocky Mountain Institute or any employee thereof.
The North Seas Countries’ Offshore Grid Initiative would knit together the power grids of the countries adjacent to the North Sea, and enable a far greater share of renewables—especially offshore wind—on the northern European grid than would be possible otherwise. It would also make it possible to use Norway’s substantial hydro capacity as a giant battery to balance out the variability of wind and solar on the grid. And in the longer term, it could be a key part of a European “supergrid” that would connect the transmission grids of all of Europe, and potentially even tap the massive solar capacity of the Middle East and northern Africa. These are big, bold ideas, and implementing them won’t be easy or cheap, but the benefits would be enormous… so much so that building these transmission links might be inevitable. But the planning alone has already gone on for at least seven years, and while some of the countries that would connect to the North Seas Offshore Grid are already building parts of their contribution to it, there is still much work to be done…and building the physical infrastructure might be the easy part! In this episode we talk with a Dutch expert who has been directly involved in evaluating and planning for these supergrids to see where they now stand, what their potential costs and benefits are, and what we might expect in the future.
This is a special, free "extra" episode recorded at RMI’s eLab Annual Summit in December 2016 in Austin, Texas.
Grid architecture is evolving, with loads becoming increasingly indistinguishable from generators, and local generators and other distributed resources increasingly supplying the services that were always provided by large central generators in the past. Meanwhile, an ever-evolving set of regulations for wholesale market operations is both enabling new market participants and challenging the security of old market participants. Lorenzo Kristov of the California Independent System Operator returns to the Energy Transition Show to share more of his view of the future in an interview from RMI’s eLab Annual Summit 2016.
Disclaimer
The views, opinions, and positions expressed by the author and those providing comments on these podcasts are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of Rocky Mountain Institute or any employee thereof.
This is a special, free "extra" episode recorded at RMI’s eLab Annual Summit in December 2016 in Austin, Texas.
How is Hawaii managing one of the most rapid energy transitions in history to variable wind and solar generators, while maintaining a balanced, isolated grid and actually reducing long-term costs? It’s no accident: They have developed a transition roadmap and they are working hard to adopt the latest technology while preserving social equity…not just for grid power, but for electric vehicles as well, toward a goal of reaching 100% renewable electricity by 2045. Lorraine Akiba of the Hawaii PUC shares her perspective in an interview from RMI’s eLab Annual Summit 2016.
Disclaimer
The views, opinions, and positions expressed by the author and those providing comments on these podcasts are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of Rocky Mountain Institute or any employee thereof.
This is a special edition of the Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder, recorded in December 2016 at RMI’s eLab Annual Summit in Austin, Texas.
Can utilities disrupt themselves, or does it take an outside force? How can demand response technologies—including simply informing customers of their electricity usage—help reduce demand peaks on the electricity system and reduce costs for all ratepayers? And what kinds of infrastructure, like Advanced Metering Infrastructure, are needed to enable a highly efficient grid and an informed customer base. Richard Caperton of Opower (a business unit of Oracle) shares his perspective on all of these questions in an interview from RMI’s eLab Annual Summit 2016.
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) regularly updates its estimates for how much oil and gas might be recovered in the future, and at what rate. With the application of new technology from year to year, those estimates generally keep going up. But it’s important to remember that they are just estimates — and the devil is always in the details.
Our guest in this episode is a career geoscientist who has diligently delved into those devilish details. In his new reports, he finds that EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2016 seems to significantly overstate how much oil and gas might be recovered using fracking technology, with estimates for shale gas and tight oil production that exceed the estimates for how much of those resources are even technically recoverable. In this extended and technically detailed interview, we discuss EIA’s most recent forecasts and try to understand what’s realistic for future US hydrocarbon production.
The notion of “decoupling” energy consumption from economic growth has become vogue in policy circles, but how much evidence is there that it’s really happening? If the energy intensity of our economy is falling, are we sure that it’s becoming more efficient, or might we just be offshoring energy-intensive industries to somewhere else…along with those emissions? If energy reaches a certain percentage of total spending, does it tip an economy into recession? Is there a necessary relationship between energy consumption and monetary policy? Is there a point at which the simple fact that we live on a finite planet must limit economic growth, or can economic growth continue well beyond our resource consumption? Can the declining EROI of fossil fuels tell us anything about the future of the economy? And can we have economic growth using clean, low-carbon fuels, or might transitioning to an economy that produces zero net new carbon emissions put the economy into recession and debt?
To help us answer these thorny questions, we turn to an expert researcher who has looked at the relationship between energy consumption and the economy over long periods of time and multiple economies, and found some startling results with implications for the Federal Reserve, for economic policymakers, and for all those who are involved in energy transition.
Ireland is one of the most advanced countries in energy transition, getting over a quarter of its electricity from renewables. It also has one of the most ambitious targets—to obtain 40% of its electricity generation from renewables by 2020—and the resources to be more than 100% powered by renewables, given time and technological development. On the flip side, it also has a severe dependence on imported fossil fuels, and relies on some of the dirtiest power plants in the world.
In this episode, we explore this curious mix of reality, ambition, and potential with the leader of Ireland’s Green Party, a bona fide energy wonk and a longtime supporter of energy transition. From Ireland’s domestic renewable resources to the tantalizing possibility of the North Seas Offshore Grid initiative, it’s all here.
The cost of wind power has been falling steadily again since the 2008 price spike, and newer projects have been coming in at 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, making them very competitive with natural gas fired power and ranking among the very lowest-cost ways to generate electricity. But can wind prices keep falling, or have they bottomed out?
A recent report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the National Renewable Energy Lab, and other organizations offers some clues. Based on a survey of 163 of the world’s foremost wind energy experts, it examines in detail what factors have led to wind’s cost reductions in the past, and attempts to forecast what will drive further cost reductions in the future. It also looks at some of the reasons why previous forecasts have underestimated the growth and cost reductions of wind, and suggests that many agency forecasts may be underestimating them still. In this episode, one of the report’s principal authors explains the findings and offers some cautionary words about how much confidence we can have in our forecasts.
What combination of power generators on the U.S. grid produces reliable power at the lowest cost? Or, what’s the most renewable energy that can be deployed at a given grid power cost, and what kind of transmission capacity is needed to support it? How would the U.S. grid be different if it were one, unified grid with more high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission capacity? What’s the most productive design for a wind farm? How might weather and a changing climate affect future electricity production from wind and solar farms? And how much renewable power is really feasible on the U.S. grid?
These have been devilishly difficult questions to answer, but now advanced mathematical simulations are beginning to make it possible to answer them much more quickly…and if quantum computing becomes a reality, we could answer them instantly.
In an homage to Comedy Central’s Drunk History, this episode features a conversation conducted over several pints of IPA with a mathematician who recently developed such a simulator while he was working at NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) in Boulder, CO. His insights on how the grid of the future might actually function are fascinating, and will likely shatter some of your pre-existing beliefs. It also contains a few nuggets for the serious math geeks out there.
It is widely assumed that the ongoing migration of rural peoples to mega-cities all over the world will help reduce humanity’s per-capita energy footprint, while giving people a higher standard of living and accelerating energy transition. But the world is full of old, inefficient cities in desperate need of an eco-makeover, and of experts who understand the principles of “smart urbanization” and who can help identify how to transform a city from brown and dumb to smart and green. What’s the potential for replacing concrete with living things in cities? How can autonomous and electric vehicles help make cities cleaner and more livable? Why isn’t China promoting its phenomenal success with e-bikes to the rest of the world? Is China’s commodity demand going to continue to weaken as it moves away from a manufacturing economy? And will the emissions it was generating just move elsewhere when it does? All these questions and more are answered in this wide-ranging conversation with an expert on smart urbanization and China.
Although it’s clear enough that energy transition is necessary and reasonable, and although we know that transition is mainly happening on the grid at first, there is still much uncertainty about exactly where on the grid different strategies can be tried, how much they can accomplish, and what they’ll cost, relative to the alternatives….not to mention how the rest of the grid will respond as different measures—like storage, demand response, rooftop solar, controlled dispatch, and so on—are implemented. What’s needed to answer all these difficult questions? Better models, including serious math, by serious researchers.
Fortunately, one of those researchers is willing and able to explain several years of her work in grid modeling at NREL and elsewhere. So tune in and put on your thinking caps, because this episode (Geek Rating 10!) is not for the faint of heart.
As the world continues to struggle with the effects of climate change, energy transition is more important than ever as a key pathway to stopping global warming. But will it be enough? Many serious climate researchers think it won’t be, and urge deliberate attempts to directly alter the Earth’s climate by using a number of technologies, loosely grouped under the heading of geoengineering. But geoengineering has not won much support from the climate and environmental communities, and still struggles to gain enough legitimacy to attract sufficient research funding to attempt serious pilot projects that might tell us whether geoengineering holds real promise as a safe, cost-effective, and powerful tool in a portfolio of climate change mitigation strategies.
So what is the real potential of geoengineering to address climate change? How much would it cost? How risky is it, and what justification might there be for taking that risk? And what sorts of attitudinal shifts might be needed within the climate and environmental communities to embrace geoengineering as one of a portfolio of strategies? We attempt to answer all of those questions and more in this interview with a veteran science journalist and author of a recent book on geoengineering.
Energy and water are inextricably linked: It takes energy to supply water, and it takes water to supply energy. And those processes consume vast amounts of both. Yet we have only really begun to study the energy-water nexus and gather the data that policymakers will need to understand the risk that climate change poses to both power and water. As rainfall and temperatures continue to depart from historical norms, forcing conventional power plants to throttle back or shut down, we may need to invest more heavily in wind and solar PV just to keep the lights on. Even more radical solutions may become necessary, like switching to more dry-cooled power plants, and desalinating brackish groundwater. Ideally, we would treat the challenges of the energy-water nexus in an integrated way, deliberately reducing our energy and water demands simultaneously as part of our energy transition strategies, but our governments aren’t typically set up for that, and much more basic research and analytical work is needed.
What if we didn’t have to work around the grid we have today, with all of its inertia and incumbents and inflexibility? If we could start over and design the grid from scratch, what would it look like? And once we understood that, how might it change the way we are going about energy transition now, in order to reach that goal more quickly and directly? If what we really want is a grid that is fair, equitable, reliable, efficient, resilient, sustainable, and which serves our climate and social goals, what are the first principles we might work from, and what mechanisms might get us where we want to go? This freewheeling conversation aims to help all of us “think outside the box” a bit more, and imagine what the possibilities might be if we could just start over.
Should we tweak our markets to keep nuclear plants alive, or forget about markets and pay for them another way… and do we really need them at all to keep the grid functioning? Is nuclear power really declining because of overzealous environmentalists, or are there other reasons? Is it possible to balance a grid with a high amount of variable renewables and no traditional baseload plants? Is cost-benefit analysis the right way to approach energy transition? How much “decoupling” can we do between the economy and energy consumption, and how can we correctly measure it? Why are we so bad at forecasting energy and economic growth, and how can we do it better? How will energy transition affect the economy?
We explore all of these questions and more, and try to separate fact from falsehoods in this wide-ranging interview. It might even change your mind about a few things.
Is conventional, free-market economic theory really up to the task of energy transition and combating climate change? Can we let the so-called invisible hand of the market guide us through the troubled waters ahead, or will we need firm policy direction and deliberate, top-down planning to secure the best outcomes? How useful can free markets be, in transitioning us away from coal, and meeting our climate targets and securing enough carbon-free power to run our societies? Will they be any help at all in supporting technologies like carbon capture and sequestration, or geoengineering? Can negative discount rates help us pay for climate change mitigation projects? And what does the future hold for oil? We discuss all of these questions and more with veteran energy editor Ed Crooks of the Financial Times.
Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) like the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the Asian Development Bank are publicly committed to ending energy poverty and enabling energy access to the developing world. But their conventional processes and approaches to risk management make it difficult for them to invest in the decentralized renewable energy solutions that have the best chance of lifting people out of energy poverty. So what can be done about it? To find out, we talk with a pioneer in the energy investment and energy access space and ask her some pointed questions about how development bank funding works, and how it needs to be changed.
Utilities face a host of rapid changes in a what used to be a staid business: new business models, changing supply and demand forecasts, new distributed architectures, new types of resources, new participants in the power grid that they don't control…yet they still must maintain a highly reliable power grid that operates within fairly narrow parameters.
Meanwhile, difficult questions remain to be solved, about how we’re going to manage our grid power transition, who the winners and losers will be, what destination we’re headed for, what role consumers and “prosumers” will play in the future, and what our reasons are for executing transition the way we do.
We tackle all of these issues in this wide-ranging, very geeky conversation about the “blocks and squiggles” of the grid of the future. Grid power transition, the rebound effect, energy efficiency, utility business models, cutting-edge grid power management considerations, regulation and rate design, electric vehicles as distributed energy resources… they’re all here.
Finance geeks, this episode is for you! Latin America has had one of the fastest-growing renewable energy markets on the planet for the past several years, but nobody ever talks about it. We aim to correct that in this wide-ranging interview with Adam James, Deputy Director of Global Strategy and Policy with SolarCity. Who’s got the hottest auction design? Who’s growing at eye-popping rates? Who screwed up their incentive program so badly that nobody wants to invest there anymore? And what are some outside-the-box ideas about how to get capital flowing into distributed energy systems in the developing world? Plus: oblique Prince references! (RIP)
The last of the big-time U.S. coal companies has gone bankrupt, and in the hills of Appalachia, they’re looking for their next move. How will the former coal miners find new careers and build new industries? How will the liabilities of coal companies ever get paid? And how did we get into this situation in the first place? We talk with one of the best coal reporters in the business (and a West Virginian native) to find out.
In percentage terms, Denmark is the world leader in energy transition, as well as the king of wind power. Wind now supplies 42% of all Denmark’s electricity, and by 2020, the country plants to get fully half of its power from wind. It’s also the only developed country in the world with a serious plan to achieve 100% of its energy – just not electricity, but all energy – from renewables, and plans to do it by 2050. In this episode we talk with energy journalist Justin Gerdes about his new e-book on Denmark’s energy transition, Quitting Carbon: How Denmark Is Leading the Clean Energy Transition and Winning the Race to the Low-Carbon Future.
Improving efficiency is almost always easier and cheaper than generating new power, so efficiency should be our first target in energy transition. But it’s usually the last. And while there are very effective incentives for renewable energy, the incentives and programs for efficiency have been far less effective. In this episode we talk with efficiency guru and innovator Matt Golden about how to get away from efficiency incentive programs, and switch to performance-based markets for energy efficiency, plus how to standardize efficiency projects so that they are easier to understand, trust, and finance. Thanks to ideas like these, energy efficiency may be about to hit the big time.
Electric vehicles are all the rage right now, and hopes are high that we might finally be able to transition off of oil and on to electric cars…preferably, cars powered by clean renewable electricity and not by coal-fired grid power. But they’re still less than 1% of the new vehicle market, and they still face real challenges in consumer acceptance, a lack of charging infrastructure, and a dearth of options at the dealership. So what should we really expect from EVs in the near- and medium-term, and how realistic are the high hopes for switching a nation like the US, with nearly 260 million conventional light vehicles on the road today, over to EVs? We talk to EV expert Matthew Klippenstein to find out.
China is always a bit of an enigma to the West: It is the world’s largest user of coal and the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide; the world’s largest car market; it has the world’s largest shale gas resources; and it has been building entire “ghost cities” with no one living in them. But it is also the world leader in energy transition, with more wind and solar deployment than any other nation; it has a massive grid construction program and the world’s largest and most rapid high-speed rail construction program; and before long, it will probably have the world’s largest market for electric vehicles.
To understand the trajectory of the world’s energy transition effort, we have to understand what’s happening in China. But its official data are unreliable, and official statements can vary wildly from the facts on the ground. That’s why in this episode we talk with James West, a senior digital editor for Mother Jones and former senior producer for Climate Desk, who has traveled to China to get those stories firsthand.
Many have heard of peak oil, but few seem to understand what it really means, and fewer still know much of anything about the father of the idea, M. King Hubbert. In this episode we interview science journalist Mason Inman, who has written the first biography of Hubbert: The Oracle of Oil: A Maverick Geologist's Quest for a Sustainable Future, which hits the shelves April 11. Deeply researched and rich with detail about the debates over our energy future (and energy transition) from the 1940s through the 1980s, the book is a terrific read for anyone interested in peak oil theory, what it is about, and what it is not about (for example, oil prices!). Today’s debates about the future of energy aren’t too dissimilar from the debates of 60-70 years ago…and that should make us think hard about where we’re going.
Check out the interview that critics are calling “way too long!” with the author of the book that Publisher’s Weekly called “tedious!”
No, seriously: Check it out. It just may be the best material you’ll ever find on what “peak oil” really is.
Plus: I explain why I’m skeptical about IEA’s new report on the decoupling of carbon emissions and economic growth.
What’s the best way to bring energy to those in the developing world who lack it? Why do forecasts by agencies like IEA always seem to overstate the cost of solutions in the developing world? Why do big expensive programs run by NGOs and the World Bank so often fail to achieve their aims of alleviating energy poverty? Why do those programs always seem to favor big coal plants, nuclear plants, CCS projects, and other big-ticket items that never seem to get built? And what’s actually getting the job done, right now, in places like sub-Saharan Africa? What are the prospects for those efforts in the future? We answer these questions and more…like where Bill Gates goes wrong with his zero-carbon equation.
Everyone knows that India is the second-largest coal importing nation in the world, after China, and that it is the fastest-growing source of global CO2 emissions thanks to its rapid adoption of coal. And it is widely believed that India will remain the world’s fastest-growing market for coal for years to come. But sometimes what “everybody knows” is wrong. Renewables are now hitting grid parity, and are poised to snatch the lead away from coal in India. Plus: We round up the cheapest solar projects ever in the US and the world.
What kind of grid architecture and markets will we need in order to actually operate the distributed, decentralized grid of the future? What sorts of regulatory models will be needed? And what does it all mean, from a philosophical point of view, about how human society is organized? How can mere mortals begin to understand these subjects? Never fear: We’ve got you covered, in this ultra-geeky yet accessible episode.
A full-spectrum romp through the macroeconomic context: Stock markets; oil and gas prices; coal's collapse; the difficult LNG export market; what commodities are telling us about the health of the global economy; trends in oil and electricity demand and electric vehicles; currency valuations and trends; the outlook for renewables; and much more!
All about storage on the grid -- in front of the meter -- with a little bit about behind-the-meter storage. How to value storage, how storage complements and replaces generation, and some geeky excursions into locational marginal pricing, PURPA, non-market uplift payments, and FERC Order 819! And in the news segment: Comments on the COP 21 United Nations Climate Change Conference and an update on carbon capture and storage (CCS).
All about EROI (Energy Return on Investment), the state of biophysical economics, the relationship between energy and ecology, and what EROI could and should tell us about the outlook for a fuel -- for example, can we run a society on renewables? And in the news segment: LNG's troubled future, how low oil prices are causing surging gasoline consumption, and the risk of the next oil price spike.
In this episode we talk with a longtime energy analyst about why it's risky for the oil industry to assume that future demand for petroleum will remain as strong as they forecast, given the favorable economics of switching to EVs. We also discuss the recent history of oil production and prices, the future of the oil industry, the potential for transitioning away from oil and the opportunity for EVs, and ERCI - the Energy Returned on Capital Invested. And in the news segment: the oil industry's latest moves and announcements about climate change; three important trends we should recognize in the retirement of yet another US coal plant; and a new report from Carbon Tracker calls IEA and EIA on the carpet for consistently overestimating future demand for fossil fuels, and consistently underestimating the growth of renewables.
One man's sweeping ride through three decades of campaigning for action on climate and deploying solar from a veteran of the "carbon wars," plus his pithy observations on what our leaders in government and in the energy industry really think. And in the news segment: New studies are finding that renewables are getting cheaper than any other grid power; the continuing death of "baseload power" and the rise of flexible grids; more coal and nuclear power plants are being closed; and why deregulation and consumer choice isn’t necessarily the fastest path toward grid power transition.
All about Germany's famed energy transition effort, the Energiewende. What it is, what it isn't (with a strong dose of mythbusting), and what the future of grid power looks like from one of the countries on the leading edge. And in the news segment: US LNG export terminals could be in trouble; China's massive push for renewables; and the latest action in oil prices.
How energy markets need to change to level the playing field for renewables, how renewables should be valued, and whether wind and solar must "eat their own lunch" by virtue of having a free marginal cost, or whether markets can be adjusted to prevent that. And in the news segment: Shell gives up on the Arctic; the new premier of Alberta does an about-face on fossil fuels; and solar is even cheaper than most energy analysts think (because the data is old).
What the modeling work of our national renewable energy lab tells us about how far renewables can go on the grid under various scenarios, and their real technical limits.
How the real war on coal is about economics, geology, and little skirmishes in local courts, not a national or presidential campaign; and the tragic failing of politics to address the phasing-out of coal that has been going on in the US for many years. And in the news segment: More calls to kill the UK's planned Hinkley Point C nuclear plant; shale drillers' dirty little debt secret; the latest in the battle over the US oil export ban; and what the Fed's inaction says about energy transition.