Energy

The 2100 Projections Came First. Then Clients Asked For 2050 Roadmaps.

Most decarbonization scenarios stop at 2050 because policy targets do. Steel mills, aircraft fleets, ports, electricity grids and industrial supply chains do not. A pathway can reach net zero in a target-year spreadsheet while leaving behind an energy system that is expensive, physically implausible or dependent on technologies that never … [continued]

CPH2’s Failure Shows Why The Hydrogen Stack Isn’t The Product

CPH2 did not merely lose an experimental electrolyzer. Its destructive test failure exposed a mismatch between the product the company promoted and the business it was actually trying to operate. After more than a decade of development, a public listing and roughly £50 million in disclosed financing before its 2026 … [continued]

Hydrogen Demand Shrinks When It Is Counted Properly

Hydrogen demand is usually discussed as if the world is about to discover a giant new fuel market. That is the wrong starting point. Hydrogen is already a very large industrial molecule, but most of that demand is tied to the fossil-fuel system, fertilizer, methanol and process chemistry. It’s a … [continued]

Energyminer’s River Turbines Are Real. The Cheap Baseload Claim Needs Operating Data.

Energyminer has something much better than a rendering. Its Energyfish is a small floating hydrokinetic turbine, mostly underwater, anchored in a river current, sending power to shore through a cable and feeding a land-side power box for grid-compliant electricity. It is not a dam, not a conventional run-of-river hydro plant … [continued]

Climate-Tech Claims Need A Red-Flag Pass Before They Get Money

Climate-tech claims usually arrive with a promise and a request attached. The promise is that a new process, fuel, device, material, reactor, storage system or platform will solve a difficult part of decarbonization. The request is for public funding, private capital, procurement support, regulatory preference, a grant, a mandate, a … [continued]

Electricity Wins Because It Breaks The Fossil Fuel Chain

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]

Economic Growth No Longer Guarantees Fuel Growth

For most of the 20th century, a simple assumption worked well enough for energy forecasting: when economies grew, fuel demand grew with them. More people, more housing, more vehicles, more factories, more roads, more ports, more airports, more concrete, more steel, more coal, oil, and gas. The relationship was not … [continued]

2100 Transition Scenarios Need A Better Population Denominator

One of the easiest ways to get 2100 wrong is to carry the 20th-century population curve forward as if it still defines the future. The world went from about 2.5 billion people in 1950 to more than 8 billion today, and that expansion shaped modern assumptions about food, energy, cities, … [continued]

The LNG Detour: What Scotland’s New Ferry Teaches Us

Scotland’s Glen Sannox was launched with fanfare as the country’s first “green” ferry, meant to reduce the impact of crossings between the mainland and Arran. It was designed as a dual-fuel vessel, running on either marine diesel or liquefied natural gas, with the promise of cleaner air and lower emissions. … [continued]

Ivanpah & Heliogen: Lessons from Concentrated Solar’s Decline

Ivanpah was supposed to be the future. When it opened in the Mojave Desert in 2014, with its three towers glowing like beacons and almost 400 MW of capacity, it was the largest concentrated solar power plant in the world. It had the backing of Google, NRG Energy, BrightSource, and … [continued]