Cheap electricity cannot solve Europe’s productivity gap by itself, but it can raise energy productivity, support automation and reduce recurring fossil-fuel exposure.
Europe is running out of workers while still debating how long to preserve machines that burn imported fuel. That is an odd starting point for a competitiveness strategy. Europe’s central economic problem is not electricity prices alone. Mario Draghi’s competitiveness diagnosis is broader: weak productivity, fragmented markets, difficulty turning research … [continued]
China’s aluminum output is still rising. A sectoral CO₂ peak now depends on emissions per tonne falling faster.
Earlier this year I argued that China’s aluminum-sector carbon emissions had probably peaked around 2024. Since then, the output data have weakened one important part of that case. China produced 45.02 million tonnes of primary aluminum in 2025, 2.4% more than the year before, and another 23.19 million tonnes in … [continued]
Over the 250-year history of our nation, energy consumption has evolved from wood use in the 18th and 19th centuries to today’s use of modern renewable, hydrocarbon, and nuclear technology. In 2025, total energy used in the United States was 96 quadrillion British thermal units (quads), up 2% from 2024, but below … [continued]
Electricity’s strategic value is the shared platform between many energy sources and many useful services.
One of the easiest ways to get the energy transition wrong is to treat electricity as just another fuel. Coal, oil, gas, hydrogen, ammonia, methanol and electricity are often placed in parallel columns, as if the future is mainly a substitution table. That framing preserves too much of the fossil … [continued]
The transition does not preserve the fossil fuel pool and relabel it. Direct electrification removes most heat, motion, and storage work first, leaving molecules for narrower real jobs.
A lot of energy-transition arguments begin with today’s fossil fuel demand. Coal, oil, and gas still dominate global primary energy, so it is tempting to draw a straight line from the current fuel system to a future molecule system. Replace natural gas with hydrogen. Replace bunker fuel with ammonia or … [continued]
