2026-05-07

I've recently found the blog of Dieter Helm, a Professor of Economic Policy at Oxford University. He has revealed a few surprises about energy that have shifted my perspective. Among them:

• We have never had an energy transition. When we started massively exploiting coal, we also burned more wood. When we started massively exploiting oil and gas, we burned more coal.
• Nor are we experiencing an energy transition now: although renewables make up an increasing share of global energy consumption, total energy consumption is increasing more than this. Fossil fuel consumption is going up, not down, and shows no sign of slowing.
• In the 'bad old days' of an electricity system built on fossil fuels, we needed 60GW of capacity to reliably keep the lights on in the UK. In a grid built on renewables, we will need 120GW, because renewables are intermittent. Back-up power will need to come from some combination of fossil fuels, nuclear, and storage. That means power stations spending most of their time idling, and huge new infrastructure to support 120GW of transmission and any storage solutions.
• These 'system costs' of renewables explain why renewable energy is more expensive than fossil fuels, even though the marginal cost is cheaper, contrary to false promises that renewable energy is now 'ten times cheaper' than fossil fuels.
• Germany's push for renewables over the last few decades has been a disaster in just about every way, including increasing global CO2 emissions: with higher energy prices, German energy-intensive industries (including solar panel manufacture!) moved to China where energy, mostly fuelled by coal, is much cheaper.