The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder

Over the summer, the IEA projected that carbon emissions from the world's power sector are on track for a new record in 2026. Electricity demand is expected to grow 20% faster than it did a year ago, and this year's gas shock has pushed some countries to use more coal.
But we're fresh off a new milestone for the energy transition. Last year, wind and solar grew enough to cover virtually all of the world's new electricity demand and fossil power fell, so emissions from power plants didn't rise.
So was last year a peak we can count on, or simply a pause? Over the Energy Transition Show's history, we've seen carbon emissions stall out before. In 2017, global emissions had barely grown for three years, and some thought that was it. But then they started to rise again.
How confident can we be that fossil power emissions are truly close to their peak? In this second episode of our documentary series, we follow that question through Chris Nelder's conversations with the analysts who have been tracking it, from 2017 to today. We'll hear the signs of a lasting decline versus a temporary dip, why emerging markets can stop fossil power from growing even if the coal plants they already have don't shut down, and why so much of the answer depends on what China does next.

Featured in this episode, in the order we hear their conversations:

* Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist and energy systems analyst at Berkeley Earth, on Episode #40 (2017)
* Lauri Myllyvirta, Lead Analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, on Episode #138 (2021) and Episode #271 (2026)
* Kingsmill Bond, Energy Strategist at Carbon Tracker, on Episode #152 (2021)
* Tim Gould, co-head of the World Energy Outlook at the International Energy Agency, on Episode #242 (2025)
* Muyi Yang, Senior Energy Analyst for Asia at Ember, on Episode #260 (2025)
* Sam Butler-Sloss, Research Manager at Ember, on Episode #260 (2025)
* Nic Fulghum, Senior Data Analyst at Ember, on Episode #274 (2026)
* Aditya Lolla, Interim Managing Director of Ember, on Episode #280 (2026)

When we first created the Energy Transition Show in 2015, solar generated about 250 terawatt hours worldwide. That was roughly as much electricity as California used the same year. A decade later, as the energy transition moved ahead, solar generates more than ten times as much, matching the European Union's total electricity demand.
Though sometimes progress can seem like it isn't happening nearly fast enough. Renewables only edged past coal in 2025, by supplying around a third of global electricity. But everything built over those ten years matters now more than ever. As we reviewed on Episode #272, soon after the US and Israel attacked Iran, the Strait of Hormuz closed, and the aftermath has created a persistent disruption in global energy flows that sent oil, gas and diesel prices surging. Ember's Global Electricity Review, which we covered with Nic Fulghum on Episode #274, found that the growth in solar generation in 2025 alone could displace gas-fired electricity equal to all the LNG exported through the strait that year. Without it, this crisis would be far harder to weather against the reality of constrained fossil fuel supplies.
For decades, forecasts for where the energy transition would be by now kept coming in low. Researchers from the LUT University team featured on Episode #95 went back through the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook reports and found they consistently underestimated solar. The IEA's most ambitious scenario from 2022 had annual solar installations peaking at 657 gigawatts in 2040. By SolarPower Europe's count, the world installed more than that in 2025.
This is the first in a new documentary series, built from our past episodes, featuring interviews Chris Nelder recorded while the future was still unfolding, often years ahead of the headlines. We start with Episode #200, where Canary Media's Jeff St. John co-hosted. They remembered how bold a name like "Energy Transition Show" seemed back in 2015. Were the forecasters just being too cautious, or were their methods off?
This year, some are projecting solar installations will fall for the first time in more than twenty years. What should forecasts like that tell us about the road ahead?

Featured in this episode, in the order they first appear:

* Jeff St. John, Director of News and Special Projects at Canary Media, in conversation with Chris on Episode #200 (2023)
* Ryan Wiser, Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, on Episode #30 (2016)
* Kingsmill Bond, Energy Strategist at Carbon Tracker, on Episode #108 (2019)
* Matthew Ives, economist at Oxford's Institute for New Economic Thinking, on Episode #159 (2021)
* Doyne Farmer, Director of Complexity Economics at Oxford's Institute for New Economic Thinking, on Episode #239 (2024)
* Gregory Nemet, Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, on Episode #178 (2022)
* Christophe McGlade, Head of the Energy Supply Unit at the International Energy Agency, on

Transportation continues to electrify, as a quarter of the world's new car market in 2025 was electric, both battery and plug-in hybrids. And this area of the energy transition is already showing up in metrics that matter for the climate. Recent data shows that running a battery electric car on Europe's grid cuts lifetime emissions by more than 70% against a comparable combustion car.
But even as progress on electrifying transportation continues, many other factors are holding back the deeper decarbonization we need. A switch to EVs won't remove traffic congestion on its own, or change how much of the street a passenger car consumes at the expense of smaller and lighter options. Vehicles turn over far faster than the streets they run on.
What can make our mobility system sustainable beyond the fuel? This is exactly the tension we were getting at in Episode #96. In this episode we return to our host Chris Nelder's 2019 conversation with Debbie Hopkins, now Professor of the Human Geographies of Mobility at the University of Oxford, who warned everyone working on the technology side. Swap the engine or change the fuel and you end up with the same unsustainable system.
When Chris and Debbie spoke, electric cars were about one in forty sold worldwide. Even though now it's one in four, that still won't get the job done as the energy transition's final answer. Transportation remains the single largest source of US greenhouse gas emissions, and it will take more than decisions about engines to tackle that.

The energy transition calls for more electrification. As transportation, heating, industry, and now power demand from data centers all crowd the interconnection queues, the US needs more transmission than it has built in generations. Even energy transition skeptics can agree on the wires.

But agreement on the need for more transmission has never been enough to get lines up and running. In 2019, journalist Russell Gold joined us to tell the story of Michael Skelly, who tried harder than anyone. His company, Clean Line Energy, spent a decade developing five major transmission lines to move wind power from the Midwest to the cities that needed it. His flagship line, the 700-mile Plains & Eastern, was fully permitted and offered the Tennessee Valley Authority twenty years of wind power at $18.50 per megawatt-hour, a price even the cheapest coal can't match. But economics aside, TVA walked away and not one of the five lines got built. Gold's book Superpower explains why engineering or economics weren't able to overcome the rules written state by state that build "regulatory moats" around the incumbents and keep the outsiders out.

Seven years since then, and those moats are where the race to tackle growing power demand is backing up. Recently ERCOT froze approvals of new data-center connections while the state audits an interconnection queue that has swelled to roughly 474 gigawatts of requested power capacity, more than five times the all-time peak power demand on the Texas grid. In Washington, FERC ordered the six regional grid operators it oversees to explain where the transmission for loads like that will come from. The specific fights are new but the overall mechanism is the one Russell Gold mapped with our host Chris Nelder back in Episode #98.

Since then, Grain Belt Express, the line Skelly had to sell on the way down, has grown into an $11 billion, 800-mile project with $1.7 billion in construction contracts signed. And Skelly has a new company working on the first large-scale connection between America's two big grids, a step toward the concept of Superpower that would tie the country's balkanized regional grids into one that could more readily support the energy transition's future.

We're launching The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder – the first show on our forthcoming podcast network! This is the only episode we'll place in our Extraenvironmentalist podcast feed so please go to energytransitionshow.com to subscribe. Episode #0 features the conversation we had with Chris in XE #89 on how global macro trends are presently influencing the ongoing process of energy transition. The first few episodes are slated for a regular Wednesday release over the coming weeks.
Originally published on the Extraenvironmentalist podcast feed, 24 September 2015.

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 tail of global oil demand. And we'll see why the whole global energy system now looks like it's collapsing toward a solar-and-battery regime.

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.

Both the IEA and BNEF now project that current policies put us on track for roughly 2.5°C of warming. Some voices, like Daniel Yergin and Bill Gates, argue we should accept that trajectory and focus only on the technologies that are already winning. But even 2.5°C is still much too high. We can and must do better.

To help us take stock of the global energy transition in today's conversation, we are fortunate to be joined by Lord Adair Turner, co-chair of the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC), headquartered in London. The Commission is a global coalition of major power and industrial companies, investors, environmental NGOs, and experts working on achievable pathways to limit global warming while stimulating economic development and social progress. Lord Turner chaired the UK Climate Change Committee from 2008 to 2012, chairs insurance group Chubb Europe, and is a crossbench (non-partisan) member of the House of Lords.

We discuss how the transition is reshaping geopolitics, why the ETC's forecasts for green hydrogen have been cut roughly in half, and what Europe's green industrial policy (including its carbon border adjustment mechanism) needs to get right. We explore the roles of China and the UK in mobilizing capital for the developing world, how the UK has achieved a 75% decarbonization of its power sector in just 14 years, and what Turner calls 'double banking' — the core challenge of the mid-transition, where we're paying to build new energy systems while the old ones can't yet be switched off.

Turner makes the case that well below 2°C is still achievable, but only if we return to the climate imperative alongside the technological opportunity.

In the first year of his second term, President Donald Trump waged an all-out war on the energy transition. His administration canceled hundreds of projects created under the Inflation Reduction Act, IIJA, and CHIPS Act, blocked offshore wind farm development, and forced aging fossil-fueled power plants to continue operating after their utility owners planned to shut them down. It weaponized every federal agency from Interior to the Department of Commerce against renewable energy, seized Venezuela's oil, and pulled the US out of participation in key UN climate bodies.

The results have been staggering. Over 22 GW of wind and solar projects have been thwarted or thrown into limbo, and fully half of the country's planned new power capacity, some 117 GW, is at risk of delay. The Department of Energy has issued "emergency" orders to keep six aging coal and gas plants open, invoking a provision of the Federal Power Act originally written for wartime. None of these federal interventions were requested by a utility, grid operator, or state regulator. Courts have been pushing back hard, calling these actions arbitrary, capricious, unreasonable, and seemingly unjustified.

Whether any of these executive actions will survive is the central question. In today's conversation, we are rejoined by Ari Peskoe, Director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, to walk through dozens of Trump's energy interventions and assess which ones are likely to hold up against the growing wave of legal challenges being brought against them. As we discuss, the courts are doing a surprisingly effective job of striking down the administration's illegal maneuvers. But every project delayed or canceled while the cases grind through court is inflicting real damage on the energy transition.

If you want to see the energy transition succeed where you live, you might want to get involved in some local advocacy campaigns, or even become an organizer yourself. But how?

The energy and climate movement is overwhelmingly popular. Surveys consistently show broad public support for clean energy. Yet energy transition issues rarely crack the top ten concerns of most voters, and we remain remarkably bad at enacting political consequences when decision-makers ignore us. If being right were enough, energy transitionistas would have won by now.

In this episode, Carter Lavin—a climate and transportation activist who has spent 15 years training nonprofits, grassroots groups, businesses, and individuals to win local and state-level campaigns—shares what he's learned. His new book, If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight - A Guide to Effective Transportation Advocacy, serves as a handbook for anyone who wants to move the needle on policies that support energy transition in their own community.

We discuss how to translate your goals into specific campaigns, how to connect with allies who share your values, and how to apply pressure at the right decision points. Carter explains the "inside-outside game" that bridges the gap between wonks who read 500-page regulatory filings and activists who show up at protests. We explore power mapping, coalition building, and why working on multiple campaigns simultaneously makes your movement stronger.

If you're ready to move from watching the energy transition unfold to actively shaping it, this conversation will show you how.

Depending on where you live, the energy transition might feel like it's stalling or accelerating faster than ever. Countries are sorting themselves into two camps: petrostates seeking to stay on the fossil fuel path, and electrostates racing toward renewables, batteries, EVs, and other "electrotech." Under Trump, the US is joining Russia and Saudi Arabia in the petrostate camp, while China is leading much of the rest of the world in the opposite direction by exporting electrotech to the developing world as well as developed countries that lack domestic fossil fuel resources.

But as countries follow different paths through the energy transition, where does that leave Japan? Importing 100% of its oil and gas means it ranks among the world's most energy-vulnerable nations. After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster in 2011, Japan has lost more than a decade to inaction, stuck between a public that no longer trusts nuclear power and a political establishment reluctant to abandon enormous sunk costs in nuclear capacity. Now Japan has reached a crossroads. It can side with the petrostates, go with the electrostates, or try to straddle the line between them.

To explore Japan's options, Chris interviewed Nobuo Tanaka, former Executive Director of the International Energy Agency from 2007 to 2011. Tanaka now chairs the steering committee of Japan's Innovation for Cool Earth Forum and advises Japanese and international companies on energy strategy.

In this conversation, we'll hear Tanaka's bold proposal for Japan, Korea, and China to set aside their historical conflicts and form an electrostate alliance, much as France and Germany did after World War II when they created the European Coal and Steel Community. Tanaka also makes the case for a new generation of nuclear technology as Japan's path forward, a view on which he and Chris differ, though they agree on the stakes. And, based on his long experience in international geopolitical forums, Tanaka explains how US policy is pushing Europe and much of the rest of the world closer to China.

Happy new year!

To close out 2025, by popular demand, we're lifting the paywall on Episode #254, our comprehensive review of the state of the global energy transition with Ember's Nic Fulghum. This is one of our occasional lagniappe shows—that's what they call a little something extra in New Orleans, like the 13th bagel in a baker's dozen. So, all of our listeners on the free feed can see what you've been missing! We hope you'll share it widely with friends and colleagues because it cuts through the noise with hard data on the state of the global energy transition from one of 2025'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 2025 titled Global Electricity Review 2025 that plainly lays out these facts. One of its lead authors, Nic Fulghum, joined us in this conversation 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.

In November, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its annual World Energy Outlook (WEO) report. It was greeted with cheers from the fossil fuel industry and jeers from energy transitionistas, but there is much more to the report than either camp's narratives suggest. So Chris returned to IEA headquarters in Paris to discuss the WEO with lead author Tim Gould, as he has done for the past two years (Episode #215 and Episode #248), to get the story straight from the source.

What he found is that the revived Current Policies Scenario (CPS) shows what could happen if the energy transition is stopped in its tracks and fossil fuel demand continues to grow, as the Trump administration has stated it would like to see. While other scenarios explore continued progress in energy transition consistent with recent reports, where oil demand still peaks around 2030, and coal demand falls before the decade ends.

The report's updated global data tells another story. The oil industry spends $550 billion annually on upstream development, and 90% of that just keeps production flat. Meanwhile, 45% of new heavy freight trucks sold in China this year run on electricity or LNG, not diesel. And in the Middle East, solar is increasingly displacing oil for electricity generation and desalination of water. In Saudi Arabia alone, this could free up over a million barrels of daily consumption.

In fact, in this year's report, IEA declares that "the Age of Electricity is here." For the first time, more than half of all energy sector investment is flowing into electricity. Renewables grow "faster than any other major energy source in all scenarios."

The picture is clear: the energy transition is still going strong.

South Africa has earned a reputation for having an old, backward, and unreliable electricity system more dependent on coal than any other country with a similarly sized economy. With an aging fleet of coal-fired power plants owned by a century-old utility that has actively resisted the energy transition, its grid is ripe for modernization.

South Africa is also blessed with largely untapped wind, water, and solar resources that could meet all of the country's energy needs several times over. Few countries better exemplify both the challenge and opportunity in the energy transition.

That transition is now under way, both through deliberate official reforms and through an uncontrolled explosion of solar and batteries that customers are installing on their homes and businesses. Over seven gigawatts of behind-the-meter solar and storage now operate in a country whose grid demand rarely exceeds 30 gigawatts, all deployed with zero subsidies.

To explore this story, Chris traveled to South Africa in September 2025 for a six-week research trip. He recorded numerous interviews with people closely involved in the country's energy transition, which we are featuring in a new miniseries.

We begin with Anton Eberhard, Professor Emeritus at the University of Cape Town's Graduate School of Business. For more than 35 years, Anton has worked to modernize and liberalize South Africa's power sector in pursuit of a more equitable, just, and clean energy system. His commitment to justice runs deep: in 1977, he became one of the first white South Africans imprisoned for refusing conscription into the apartheid military. After his release, he pursued a PhD in solar energy around 1980, doing fieldwork in remote Lesotho villages long before renewables were economically viable.

In this conversation, Anton recounts the evolution of South Africa's power sector alongside his own personal history. He explains why Eskom, once named the best utility in the world, saw its energy availability factor plummet from over 90% to as low as 40% at the height of the country's power crisis. He describes the political economy keeping coal interests entrenched, his role in the groundbreaking 1998 white paper whose proposed reforms are only now, 27 years later, being implemented, and why structural changes remain critical for accelerating the energy transition. This will give you the essential context for the rest of our South Africa miniseries, and contains many universal insights that may be useful to understanding the energy transition wherever you live.

What is the role of distribution utilities in the energy transition?

Consider this paradox: Marc England, CEO of Australian distribution utility Ausgrid, has two batteries at his home but no solar panels. Instead, he buys grid power at 5 cents per kilowatt-hour during midday solar surplus, stores it, and then sells it back to the grid when prices are high, sometimes making $100 profit in a single day. Similarly, over 100,000 customers in Australia have installed batteries in their homes under a federal incentive program in just the past three months. But commercial players aren't building battery arrays on his network, despite slashing connection charges. And every time he flies into Sydney, he sees miles of empty warehouse rooftops that could host far more solar capacity if tariffs and other regulatory structures were reformed.

These market dislocations are part of an ongoing debate about who should build and own distributed energy assets (DERs). Should distribution utilities do it in order to maximize their integration? Or should they primarily provide a platform for consumer-owned DERs to connect and transact on an equal footing with utility-scale systems? Is it more practical and cost-effective for distribution utilities to build assets like battery storage systems and public EV chargers, especially where private-sector companies are not, or would it be cheaper and faster to maximize customer investment and rebuild the grid from the bottom-up?

For this conversation, Chris traveled to Sydney, Australia to debate these questions with Marc England in person. As Chris discussed with grid expert Lorenzo Kristov in Episode #205 and our Australia 2024 miniseries, there's no perfect answer, but these market structure questions will partly determine the speed of our response to climate change.

Successful energy transition projects are not one-size-fits-all. They are attuned to the local needs of their communities, and allow community priorities to shape resilience, affordability, and equity outcomes.

In today's conversation, Nadia Ahmad, Professor of Law at Barry University in Florida, shares findings from a three-year study of clean energy transitions in Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania. Based on more than 100 stakeholder interviews, the research exposes a troubling paradox. Florida suffers from frequent hurricanes, tropical storms, and flash floods, but a utility structure dominated by investor-owned companies actively prevents the community microgrids that would build resilience.

Ahmad explains how legal, policy, and regulatory frameworks at county, municipal, state, and federal levels can support community-driven clean energy transitions. She shares important insights on designing approaches to accelerate the energy transition where you live, including the seven legal elements her team identified for successful projects and the pitfalls to avoid. For instance, Florida's challenges contrast with Germany's success, where nearly half of renewable energy capacity became citizen-owned by the 2010s.

Recent headlines may create the impression that the energy transition is slowing down, struggling against headwinds, and failing to make the requisite progress against our climate targets.

But the reality is that there is enormous progress being made against the climate change challenge, especially if you step back a bit from the daily news flow and consider the trends. There is plenty of evidence that we are in fact making a good deal of progress, and that the energy transition is accelerating, not slowing down. In fact, 2025 may be the year that global emissions peak and go into decline.

In his new book, The Case Against Climate Doom — An Economist's Guide to Climate Optimism, economist Michael Jakob reveals why the "we're too late" narrative isn't just wrong, but one that fossil fuel interests use to delay climate action. Building on his degrees in physics, economics, and international relations, Michael explores how climate change mitigation, adaptation technologies and policies are spreading across the world.

The evidence is striking: Solar costs have dropped 90% in 20 years, wind 80%, batteries 97%. Norway hit 97% EV market share without banning gas cars, simply by making electric vehicles irresistible. Climate litigation is winning unprecedented cases, with Swiss seniors successfully arguing that government inaction violates human rights. Over 5,000 climate policies now exist worldwide, up from under 100 in 2005.

In today's conversation, we explore five examples from each dimension the book covers: social progress, political change, and technological advances. From the collapse of carbon lock-in, to why even Texas became a green energy powerhouse, this interview offers clear evidence showing why the transition is continuing to accelerate, not stall.

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.

Three years after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the resulting Western sanctions, the country remains an oil and gas powerhouse. Despite falling from the world's second-largest to third-largest global oil producer and seeing its export rankings decline, Russia continues to delay the global energy transition as a major fossil fuel supplier and geopolitical force.

Western observers often struggle to understand Russia's future role in energy geopolitics and the intentions of President Vladimir Putin. To shed light on these questions, we welcome back Thane Gustafson, Professor of Government at Georgetown University and a leading authority on Russian political economy. He is the author of many books, notably Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change, which we covered at length in Episodes #162 and #163.

In this nearly two-hour conversation, we explore his newest book, Perfect Storm—Russia's Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future. Gustafson carefully explains how Russia's post-Soviet reopening to the West failed, how the Crimea occupation precipitated that failure, and where Western sanctions have succeeded or failed in containing Putin's ambitions. We examine Russia's oil and gas resources, infrastructure, business capacity, and the evolving relationships between Russian oligarchs and Western governments. The discussion reveals how Russia has evaded energy export sanctions, unpacks Putin's motivations, and assesses Russia's fading fortunes as global energy transition efforts accelerate.

This episode continues our miniseries on 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. Previous episodes in this miniseries are Episode #234, Episode #235, Episode #246, and Episode #247.

In this episode, we feature three researchers and entrepreneurs in Australia who are advancing solar technology research and development:


* Martin Green, Professor at University of New South Wales, Sydney and Director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics.
* Craig Wood, CEO of Vast Energy, a concentrated solar thermal power (CSP) company.
* Richard Payne, CEO of RayGen, a concentrated solar PV and solar thermal company.


In the next and final episode in this miniseries, we’ll take a close look at how one Australian state is solving the challenges of knitting together customer-owned systems into a reliable power grid.

Although geothermal power plants have operated commercially in various parts of the world for decades, the sector hasn't attracted the investment needed to reduce costs and enable global deployment. But with further development, new methods of harnessing geothermal energy to produce heat and electricity could deliver as much as 800 GW of geothermal power capacity worldwide by 2050. That’s equivalent to the electricity demand of the United States and India combined.

In December 2024, the International Energy Agency (IEA) published "The Future of Geothermal Energy," a report exploring opportunities in this sector.

Our guest today is a lead author of that report. In this conversation, Heymi Bahar, Senior Renewable Energy Analyst with the IEA, discusses geothermal energy’s full technological potential and strategies for unlocking investment in this promising resource.

This episode is part of a miniseries about Australia's energy transition.

In late 2024, Chris traveled to Australia and recorded interviews with experts closely involved in its energy transition. The first of those interviews was featured in Episode #234, and the second in Episode #235. In Episode #246, we explored how the Australian government is working with the grid power sector to plan its transition to renewables while maintaining system reliability.

In this episode, we explore innovative approaches Australia is using to manage the evolution of its energy system.

To tell this part of the story, we weave together the perspectives of several guests:


* Darren Miller, CEO of ARENA, explains their investment focus on early-stage technologies.
* Gabrielle Kuiper, energy and climate change professional, shares insights on DER integration across Australia.
* Stephanie Unwin, CEO of Horizon Power, discusses the unique challenges of managing a remote utility in Western Australia.
* Professor John Boland describes how he and his wife used low-tech solutions to transform an uncomfortable old house into a comfortable urban oasis.


In the next miniseries episodes, we'll explore more innovations in solar power and take a close look at how one Australian state is solving the challenges of knitting together customer-owned systems into a reliable power grid.

This episode is part of a miniseries about Australia’s energy transition.

In late 2024, Chris traveled to Australia and recorded interviews with a wide range of experts who are closely involved in its energy transition. The first of those interviews was featured in Episode #234, and the second in Episode #235.

In this episode, we'll see how the Australian government is working with the grid power sector to plan and execute its transition to renewables—despite a political opposition committed to fossil fuels and nuclear. We'll also explore what's being done to ensure adequate capacity and maintain system reliability during this transformation.

To tell this story, we weave together the perspectives of several guests:

* Chris Bowen, Minister for Climate Change and Energy for the Australian Labor Party, explains Australia's decarbonization targets and the government's framework to achieve them.
* Matt Kean, Chair of Australia's Climate Change Authority, shares his team’s findings about the best pathways to meet those targets.
* Alex Wonhas of AMPYR shares insights from helping grid operator AEMO develop Integrated System Plans that describe how to evolve the system toward those targets while maintaining reliability.
* Tristan Edis of Green Energy Markets discusses the technical considerations of orchestrating new grid power resources.

In the subsequent episodes in this miniseries, we’ll be exploring how Australia is using innovation to meet the challenges of the transition. We’ll also take a closer look at how they use DER integration to support the system while helping customers gain more control over their energy bills and even save money.

In the first part, Episode #240, we reviewed the UK's unique strategies for procuring energy transition solutions. In the second part, Episode #241, we covered how the nation’s energy regulator is driving investment to support the transition.

To conclude this miniseries, we welcome back Julian Leslie, who first joined us in Episode #174. Julian is now Director of Strategic Energy Planning and Chief Engineer at Britain’s National Energy System Operator (NESO), a recently-created agency tasked with preparing Great Britain's electricity network for net zero operation by 2030. He also coordinates regional and national plans for Britain’s energy system—including gas and emerging heat networks—to meet decarbonization targets.

In this conversation, we review the progress of the innovative Pathfinder programs we discussed back in 2022, which invited the market to provide solutions that could help Britain integrate more wind and solar into its grid. We walk through the extensive process that NESO is undertaking to plan and coordinate the development of a fully decarbonized power grid by 2030. And we discuss in detail how Britain is working to massively expand its capacity in offshore and onshore wind, solar, transmission, and battery storage to meet that goal.

By setting clear decarbonization targets, then collaborating with industry and stakeholders to carry out plans to meet them, the UK is showing the world how to execute a successful energy transition. We hope this miniseries inspires other nations to follow their example.

What makes for effective and enduring green industrial policy? How can public and private investment mobilize to achieve the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C goal? Can Trump undermine climate science and the global energy transition, or will the rest of the world carry on without the US? Which policy designs can drive equitable green growth, ensuring the energy transition benefits economically disadvantaged and indigenous communities?

Today’s guest, Mariana Mazzucato, is a Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London and the Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose. An author of four influential books on shaping capitalism, growth, and economic policy for the public good, she advises governments worldwide on innovation-led inclusive and sustainable growth. She chairs several governmental and inter-governmental organizations and produces reports designed to shape economic policies, particularly in the developing world.

In these challenging times of economic upheaval, Mariana’s ideas offer valuable guidance for policymakers as they craft industrial strategies to advance the energy transition.

Heat pumps work almost like magic—delivering several times more heat energy than the electricity they require to run. Modern heat pumps are so efficient, they can even extract warmth from freezing temperatures, keeping buildings comfortable despite the cold outdoors.

With many policymakers seriously exploring ways they can accelerate heat pump adoption, we thought now is the perfect time to offer some specific and useful guidance on designing effective approaches for realizing this goal. Our guest today is Dr. Richard Lowes, a specialist in heating technology and policy with the Regulatory Assistance Project in Europe. He also co-chairs the Clean Heat Forum international policy network. Richard has advocated for heating policy since earning his doctorate in the subject from the University of Exeter a decade ago, advising the Scottish government’s heat decarbonization programme board, various UK parliamentary select committees, and serving in multiple roles within the UK government.

In this episode, we discuss why the energy transition requires us to fix leaky buildings, tradeoffs between energy efficiency upgrades and simply swapping out old boilers for heat pumps, the best policies to encourage heat pump adoption, and the measures available in Europe to support all these efforts.

What important trends are shaping the energy transition today? And what is the outlook for oil and gas demand?

In this conversation, Tim Gould of the International Energy Agency (IEA) returns to discuss key insights from the agency’s flagship annual report, the World Energy Outlook 2024. We consider the enormous implications of IEA’s view that global demand for all fossil fuels will peak and begin a slow decline within the next five years. To explore this, we take a closer look at the state of the oil and gas industry, comparing its expectations to what climate science and energy system modeling tell us about the future of fossil fuels. We also consider how the energy transition could reduce overall demand for fossil fuels, creating excess supply imbalances that reshape global markets and trade geopolitics.

Our discussion also touches on the IEA’s forecast that low-emission electricity sources like solar, wind, and nuclear will account for more than half of global power generation before 2030. Further, we explore the rising energy demand from data centers, shifting expectations for hydrogen, and the investments needed to keep clean energy growing at a pace that meets our climate targets.

This episode is the second in a miniseries about how the UK is transforming its energy system. If you missed Part One, featuring Adam Berman discussing the UK’s decarbonization progress, you can find it here.

In this conversation, Luke Ames Blackaby from Ofgem, the UK’s electricity and gas regulator, joins us to discuss how the agency is supporting technology development to meet the UK’s 2030 clean power and 2050 full decarbonization targets.

We explore a wide range of critical topics, including flexible electricity tariffs, cost-effective expansion of the transmission system for renewable energy, and adapting gas networks for hydrogen. Additionally, we cover integrating heat networks, leveraging electrified rail as a flexible demand asset, and using storage to manage variable renewable generation. Finally, we examine how regulations can evolve to accommodate emerging technologies like demand flexibility and optimize existing infrastructure.

This episode kicks off a new miniseries exploring how the UK is evolving its energy system through world-leading efforts to meet its decarbonization goals. In 2024, it closed its last coal-fired power plant and conducted its most successful Contract for Difference (CfD) auction yet, which attracted a diverse range of renewable energy projects—including more than enough offshore wind bids to make up for the lack of such projects in the 2023 auction.

The UK also launched an astonishingly ambitious effort to develop an economy-wide energy planning process for the entire country, conducted by the newly-established National Energy System Operator (or NESO). NESO produced its first report, providing essential guidance to all participants in the country’s energy system. Additionally, Great British Energy was created, which will make the British government a direct investor in renewable energy projects.

In this episode, we speak with Adam Berman, the Director of Policy and Advocacy at Energy UK, the nation’s energy industry trade group. He advocates for ways to speed up the UK’s journey to net-zero through enabling low-carbon investment in clean power generation. We review all of 2024’s developments in detail, and outline the path forward for the UK’s energy transition.

Why do most economic models consistently underestimate the speed of energy transition?

Our guest today, Doyne Farmer, believes he knows why.

Doyne is the director of the Complexity Economics program at the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University, the Chief Scientist at Macrocosm, a modeling shop specializing in complexity economics, and the author of the recent book Making Sense of Chaos—A Better Economics for a Better World.

In this conversation, Doyne argues that traditional equilibrium economics falls short at capturing the realities of a rapidly changing world. He explains how a new approach called complexity economics, using agent-based modeling, provides a more accurate picture of how economic actors actually behave that can give policymakers and investors better guidance for navigating an evolving economy. It also indicates that the energy transition and climate action are likely to develop much more quickly than current forecasts suggest.

The outlook for energy transition in the US may feel bleak at the moment, but Europe continues to make significant progress. So if you’re ready for a little good news and thoughtful conversation about the energy transition in Europe, this one’s for you!

Our guest in this episode is Jan Rosenow, a veteran European energy observer, analyst, and policy advisor with extensive experience in energy regulation and market design. As Vice President of the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP), he supports their European team with a focus on power market design, energy regulation, electrification, the gas transition and energy efficiency. Jan’s resumé includes roles at the World Economic Forum, the International Energy Agency, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the UK’s Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, and the British House of Commons, among many others. He is also an accomplished academic who has contributed extensively to hundreds of peer-reviewed articles, technical reports and opinion pieces on energy and sustainability.

In this episode, we explore where Europe’s energy policies are delivering results and where it is still falling short. We discuss the enormous need to improve building energy efficiency across the continent and how electrifying heating systems can help. Jan also explains why balancing electricity and gas prices is key to supporting the energy transition. And Chris offers a few thoughts on how the re-election of Donald Trump might impact energy transition in the years ahead.

Nuclear power is “having a moment.” Frequently in the news, it is hailed by proponents as a critical part of decarbonizing our economy and meeting rising power demand. But does nuclear truly have a role to play in the energy transition?

The fact is that nuclear power plants are only built when they have significant government backing. Around the world, the private sector avoids these projects unless governments take all the risk, and offer extensive financial support—below-market loans, grants, and subsidies—as well as unlimited technical expertise, personnel, research, and supply chain support.

This raises the question: Why do governments insist on pursuing nuclear power when it has continually proven to be the most expensive, risky, and slowest way to generate power?

Our guest this episode, M.V. Ramana, has conducted extensive research to uncover the reasons behind the enduring support for nuclear power. A professor at the University of British Columbia, Ramana brings a wealth of expertise from his career in nuclear physics, nuclear weapons, nuclear power plants (including SMRs), and public policy on international security and energy supply.

His recent book, Nuclear is not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change, delivers a comprehensive and unflinching critique of nuclear energy as a meaningful climate solution. In this conversation, we discuss the roles of government, industry, and politics in perpetuating nuclear power, and whether its future is compatible with the energy transition.

The energy transition is making good progress on several fronts. Renewables are displacing fossil fueled electricity generation. Heat pumps are decarbonizing space heating. Electric vehicles of all sizes are replacing oil-powered cars.

But the world's industrial decarbonization is really just getting started. Industry generates roughly one-third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, so solutions for this sector are critical for the energy transition.

We have made faster progress in decarbonizing electricity, transportation, and heating because it’s easier to replace a handful of dirty technologies with clean alternatives. Decarbonizing industry, however, is a far more complex task, involving thousands of materials, processes, and end products. That’s why they used to be called “hard-to-decarbonize” sectors.

Fortunately, there are clear starting points. More than half of industrial emissions come from steel, cement, and chemicals—which we know how to decarbonize. And there are solutions on the horizon for the rest of industry too.

In this conversation, Jeffrey Rissman, Senior Director of Industry at the San Francisco based think-tank Energy Innovation, walks us through each of the industrial sectors and the solutions for each one. Jeff is the author of a recent book titled Zero-Carbon Industry: Transformative Technologies and Policies to Achieve Sustainable Prosperity, and after listening to this episode, you’ll know just about everything you need to know about industrial decarbonization.

The energy transition in China is a complex picture. China is both the world's largest annual greenhouse gas emitter and the largest market for electric vehicles. It’s the largest user of coal, and it deploys more wind and solar every year than the rest of the world combined. It’s both the largest worry in terms of rising CO2 concentrations, and the biggest hope for curbing emissions.

But in syndicated media, this complex reality tends to be boiled down to old tropes, generalized and unhelpful characterizations, and correct but irrelevant data, instead of any useful context and synthesis.

So you might be forgiven for not knowing that power sector emissions in China actually fell in the second quarter of 2024, and China’s CO2 emissions could be close to a peak in its CO2 emissions, which means the world probably is too.

The reporting on India and the rest of Southeast Asia is even worse, if not nonexistent.

So we are very pleased to welcome back Australian energy analyst Tim Buckley to the show. We sat down in person in Sydney for an hour and a half conversation about the trends and the data in all of those countries, as well as their trade relationships with Australia. And we begin to explore the potential for Australia to use its abundant and cheap wind and solar resources to produce green hydrogen, then use it to upgrade the ores and other materials that it exports to Asia and beyond.

After listening to this episode, we hope you’ll have a much better idea of the reality of the energy transition in Asia and Australia.

In August 2024, Chris commenced a three-month research trip across Australia and New Zealand to explore their unique challenges and opportunities in the energy transition, and to conduct interviews with the people involved. This episode kicks off a miniseries based on those travels.

We start by speaking with Giles Parkinson, a journalist for more than 40 years who has arguably covered Australia’s energy transition more thoroughly and consistently than anyone else. Giles is the founder and editor of Renew Economy and the co-host of the weekly Energy Insiders Podcast as well as the founder of two other websites: One Step Off The Grid, which provides information to consumers contemplating what they can do to support the energy transition, and The Driven, which is billed as “Australia’s most-trusted and well-read electric vehicle news site.”

In this roughly 90-minute conversation, we frame up the big picture on Australia’s energy transition, including the major themes and vectors of change. We discuss several significant energy transition projects as well as the politics of the energy transition in Australia, including the roles of various government agencies.

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.

Twenty-six years ago, on a wee island with just 65 residents off the west coast of Scotland, the seeds of a fascinating energy transition project were planted. That began a long process which ultimately made it possible for the island’s inhabitants to become the world’s first community to launch an off-grid electric system powered by wind, water and solar.

In the Autumn of 2023, Chris traveled to that island—the Isle of Eigg—to see it for himself, and interview some of the key people who were involved in making it happen. You’ll learn all about how it happened and what the island’s residents plan to do next in their pursuit of greater self-determination and self-sufficiency.

This is our second show in the new, place-based format we piloted in Episodes #186 and #187. Instead of exploring a particular topic with one guest who has a noncommercial perspective, as most of our shows have done so far, this new format aims to tell the stories about how the energy transition is proceeding in some of the places Chris is visiting in his ongoing travels as a peripatetic podcaster. There will be more episodes in this format to come, and we hope you enjoy them.

Should our response to global warming focus on technologies that reduce emissions, or on embracing simpler lifestyles? Why do some believe that deploying more renewables and accelerating the energy transition is essential, while others advocate for ‘degrowth’ instead, and claim that switching to renewables is counterproductive?

Today’s conversation explores a recent paper by lifecycle assessment researcher Marco Raugei of Oxford Brookes University, in which he describes an ongoing debate between “systemic pessimists” who focus on humanity’s demands for resources and dismiss renewable technologies, and “technological optimists” who focus on the technologies of the energy transition but do not address other planetary boundaries. We describe these two tribes and their beliefs, identify their points of disagreement, and try to suggest a way forward.

We’ll also discuss another recent paper Marco co-authored exploring whether there are important material limits to the energy transition. And to wrap it up, Chris offers his longest monologue yet, in which he draws a distinction between “techno-optimists” and energy transition advocates, and suggests some ways that we might advance the debate beyond its current unhelpful framing.

Ultimately, we hope this episode will persuade some “systemic pessimists” to consider shifting their narrative from doom and to refocus on actively solving problems, including the problem of global warming.

Are EV sales about to hit an inflection point and rapidly take majority market shares for new vehicles?

And if they are, does that portend a peak in global oil demand before the end of this decade?

The transportation team at BloombergNEF certainly thinks so.

In this data-packed, two-hour conversation, team lead Colin McKerracher walks us through their latest report, Electric Vehicle Outlook 2023, published in September. We explore the outlook for EVs, plug-in hybrids, and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in all vehicle classes. We consider the differing trajectories of EV adoption in various parts of the world, and especially the rapid uptake of two- and three-wheeled electric vehicles in Asia. We discuss the looming need for more charging infrastructure and the implications of increased vehicular demand for the utility industry. We review the changing competitive landscape for the world’s major automakers, and see which ones are leading and which ones are lagging, and why. And we revisit the question of whether the world can produce enough key minerals to keep EV production growing.

If we genuinely need nuclear power—be it older conventional designs or new, unproven small modular designs—to make the energy transition a success, then that case has not been demonstrated. Instead, nuclear advocates have primarily used political argument to support continued investment in it. Because if we just went by the industry’s actual track record, and properly internalized its risks and high costs, we’d never build another nuclear power plant again.

Nuclear power never had a proper justification as an electricity generation technology. It is an industry built on a foundation of lies, extravagance, conceit, and failure. It always has been, and continues to be, a fig leaf for the nuclear weapons industry.

The fact is that we do not need nuclear power to make the energy transition a success. Even if we did continue to invest in it and force the public to shoulder its actual risks and excessive costs, doing so could actually hinder the energy transition, not advance it.

Our guest in this episode, Stephanie Cooke, has literally written the book on the untold history of nuclear power. As the former editor of Nuclear Intelligence Weekly and the author of In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age, she brings over four decades of experience as a professional nuclear industry journalist. She explains why, contra the recent pro-nuclear sentiment captivating climate hawks, the nuclear power industry is not at the dawning of a new age, but rather at the end of its old age.

Can ancient architectural and building techniques help us create comfortable spaces without consuming energy in today's world?

Our guest in this episode thinks so.

Dr. Sandra Piesik is an award-winning architect, author, and scientist with extensive experience in what is now called “vernacular architecture.” Among many other things, she specializes in agitating for legislation supporting sustainability and nature-based solutions to the climate challenge.

She has published two books on vernacular architecture, including Habitat—Vernacular Architecture for a Changing Climate, published in May of this year. In it, she curates the work of an international team of more than one hundred experts across a diverse range of disciplines, who examine what the traditions of vernacular architecture and its regional craftspeople around the world can teach us about creating a more sustainable future. With over 1000 illustrations, the book reveals how people and cultures have used indigenous materials and construction techniques in all five of the planet’s climate zones to create comfortable built environments, and it stresses the importance of preserving disappearing craftsmanship and local knowledge before it is lost forever.

In today’s conversation, we discuss what ‘vernacular architecture’ is, what some of the specific techniques are, how those techniques could be used today, and what’s preventing us from using them. We also discuss the role of vernacular architecture within the broader context of sustainable development, and what a holistic approach to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals might look like.

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 plans 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.

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.

For the Energy Transition Show’s eighth anniversary, we welcome back energy researcher Jonathan Koomey, a veteran guest who shares invaluable insights with us in our annual reviews.

We kick off the episode by analyzing the impact of the global response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the energy transition.

Then we revisit four big energy transition themes:

* Command Capitalism: Exploring the growing trend of government intervention in energy markets.
* Climate Change Narratives: Challenging the propensity for doom mongering about climate and the energy transition, and exploring why that’s not only unhelpful but also myopic.
* Systemic Challenges: Reviewing how our many systems have been rigged in favor of fossil fuels, and discussing strategies to un-rig them.
* The Mid-Transition: Navigating the demands of the transitional phase as we shift from old systems to new ones.

Prepare yourself for another smörgåsbord of energy transition goodness! So, strap on a napkin and join us for a journey through the pivotal moments and themes of the past year!

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.

A tsunami of distributed energy resources (DERs) is starting to arrive on the grid. Customers are adopting millions of EVs, rooftop solar systems, battery backup units, and other devices that can dynamically respond to grid conditions. But most utilities are not engaging with this wave proactively. Instead, they’re being reactive, slow, and even resistant to allowing these devices to connect to the grid or participate in transactions.

As we rebuild and transform the grid in the course of the energy transition, we really need to think about how to accommodate DERs. There are manifold reasons to build a decentralized grid from the bottom-up, instead of keeping the conventional, top-down, hub-and-spoke architecture based on the large centralized power plants that we have relied upon in the past. So how do we do it?

Lorenzo Kristov has been agitating for this new architecture for years, frequently issuing white papers and expert testimony to get regulators and others thinking about what the future grid should look like. And his ideas are being taken seriously, because he was a lead designer of the locational marginal pricing (LMP) market on which California’s wholesale power system operates. He has deep expertise in wholesale market design, DER participation in wholesale markets, coordination of transmission-distribution system operations, distribution system operator (DSO) models, distribution-level markets, microgrids, energy resilience strategies, and whole-system grid architecture, among other things. And he has been walking us through his vision for the decentralized grid in previous episodes of our show: #10, #94, and #150.

In today’s episode, Lorenzo rejoins us to build on our previous conversations and share his latest thinking about how to make the new energy transition grid architecture happen. We discuss market design, architecture, procurement, regulatory issues, and related topics, making this episode deserving of a Geek Rating of 10.