Last week I was lucky enough to attend an event at the Royal Institution hosted by Braintree entitled ‘AI: Digital Consciousness – Sustainable Intelligence’. As far as I understand it, Braintree has developed a different approach to AI based on Symbolic architecture, which promises AI with far lower computing requirements and hence far lower power and water requirements in data centres – a more sustainable way.

Like many people, I have played around with LLMs and have been equally amazed and terrified. The incidence of LLM hallucination, coupled with a general and probably growing trend to accept anything that comes out of a computer as true, is deeply worrying with massive implications for education, science, engineering, our brains, and global society.

The whole evening was so interesting I have tried to write up my notes from the event, apologies to the speakers if I have mis-interpreted their presentation.

The two external speakers were brilliant and thought provoking. Kay Firth-Butterworth is a lawyer who has specialised in ethical AI for fourteen years, which in itself is amazing given that 14 years ago the profile of AI was much, much lower than today.

Kay’s presentation included the facts that: 20% of men in the US have an intimate relationship with an AI, each query to an LLM consumes 0.25 litre of water, and that by next month AI will be generating more data than humans. Kay spoke about the problems that AI is creating in the legal system where briefs now often include ‘hallucinations’ created by AI, either referring to non-existent cases or just making up evidence. This means the legal system is grinding to a halt and of course lawyers can be charged with contempt if they put forward arguments based on AI hallucinations.

There is also evidence from the US that AI means that recent University graduates are illiterate in their own subjects. AI is literally creating stupidity. Trust in AI is falling but at the same time it is increasingly being deployed, not just in ‘simple’ things like the apps and programs we use but also in autonomous lethal weapons. Organisations are facing cascading risks and the very nature of management and leadership is changing.

The second speaker, Pippa Malmgren, has been an adviser to President George W. Bush, and the UK Cabinet, as well as many large companies. Having set the context of the explosion in knowledge Pippa gave essentially a positive view of AI and talked about how it can do the ‘heavy lifting’ in many fields while humans can be freed up for more human things, like art and creativity.

Pippa talked about how AI is forcing the abandonment of the cartesian split, the split between left brain and right brain. She also touched on how most of our data input is visually whereas other senses like touch and smell are important. She used good quotations including:

Suffering comes from having an argument with reality

Evolution comes from adapting to reality

Imagination is more important than analytics

Pippa believes that AI will help us move from scarcity to abundance.

The vision of AI taking on the heavy lifting, and the dull and dirty tasks, while humans focus on creativity and more right brained stuff, is beguiling – and of course it has long been used in science-fiction. The concern of course is that if all the ‘boring’ stuff like cars, the Air Traffic Control system, nuclear power stations, and the ICBMs are controlled by AI which starts hallucinating that is really very bad. This vision has also been widely used in science fiction, notably in the 1970 film “Colossus: The Forbin Project” in which an AI is given command of the ICBMs and starts communicating with its Russian equivalent. In ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ HAL tries to kill all of the crew of the spacecraft as he has decided it is in the best interests of the mission.

It seems that through the work of Kay and others we have started to address the issue of ethical AI but we need to do a lot more as the Silicon Valley ‘tech bros’ and wave of investors backing AI seem hell bent on pushing its use without much if any thought. The precautionary principle seems to have been forgotten entirely.

A few things came together for me in the last week or so including; reading an article about the continued low returns from fossil fuel investments; the continued extreme high temperatures in the UK and much of Europe and the USA; the passing of Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’, (‘BBB’); and a text conversation with a pioneer of sustainable finance who categorised his work as ‘early skirmishes’. His phrase inspired me to continue my military inspired theme from my blog of 2 June, ‘Are energy engineers fighting the last war?’ in today’s title.

The energy transition, (and the wider drive towards net zero), like all economic and social transitions, can be characterised as a war – a war between the incumbents who will fight tooth and nail, using all their resources and powers, to protect their existing business, and the disruptors. It is a familiar story from the innovation literature as well as history. The early skirmishes have been things like the work on sustainable finance and the adoption of renewables using various forms of subsidies in the early days. Now we are in a situation where economics, the really powerful driver – the big guns if you like, are widely, (if not universally yet), in favour of electrification, renewables, batteries and flexibility and against fossil fuel driven systems. The relative economics makes capital flow but of course changes in the direction of capital are not instant and there is considerable inertia in the system caused by several factors, including the long life time of many assets and investors wanting to maintain at least the illusion of financial performance by not publicly admitting losses.

The incumbents are clearly facing a rising tide that in time will wash them away – but until that happens they will build every barrier they can. We see that in the ‘PR’ (actually propaganda) against EVs and heat pumps, and we see it very clearly in the ‘BBB’ which will end tax credits for renewables as well as open up Federal lands for oil and gas drilling and coal mining. In the words of the President of the American Petroleum Institute, ‘It includes almost all of our priorities’ so they have won that battle in the US but it doesn’t mean they have won the war.

Meanwhile the Institute for Energy Economic and Financial Analysis reports that:

• Fossil fuel stocks reported a 5.72% return in 2024, barely one-fifth of the S&P 500’s return of 25.02%
• The fossil fuel sector has under-performed the S&P 500 in seven of the last 10 years, delivering the lowest returns and highest volatility of any of the S&P’s sectors over the period.
• At the end of 2024 the energy sector made up only 3.2% of the S&P’s total value, compared to 30% in 1980.
• Fossil fuel investments are now an implicit bet on geopolitical disruption and near-term destabilisation.
• The sector’s free cash flow remained weak.
• The shift of capital away from fossil fuels continued as more major pension funds divested.

This shift was also reflected in the IEA’s 2024 World Energy Investment report which showed that the investment into clean energy of $2 trillion is almost twice that into fossil fuels.

Investors consider returns and risks – low returns and high volatility are bad, higher and stable returns which can be generated by electrification and renewables are inherently more attractive. The big guns of economics and the shifting capital flows are just getting started. The battle ahead will not be easy and will not be without its losses, but the outcome is clear.

Note
The quote in the title is from Winston Churchill’s speech on the Battle of Egypt in the Mansion House, 10 November 1942.

On the 17th June I was at ZPN Energy’s #INEED event in my role as Chair of ZPN. This is the text of what I had intended to say but in the interests of time I didn’t say it all. It was an attempt to give some historical context for the scale of the energy transition over the last 40 years and look forward to the next 40 years. It contains themes familiar to regular readers.

I want to give you some historical perspective on the energy transition and the changes that we are going through, and also give some grounds for optimism at a time when it is sometimes hard to be optimistic. I have been around long enough that I can now give you a historical perspective from my own life-time experience.

I first started studying what we now call the energy transition in 1977 and it was a very different world back then. We had just had the Arab Israeli war of 1973 which led to quadrupling in the price of oil and that is what really started ‘energy’ as a subject, and it kick-started the changes we now call the energy transition that we are living through now. In 1979 we had the second oil crisis caused by the Iranian revolution – and my Iranian friends are hoping that given what’s going on now we may soon see the 2nd Iranian revolution and they will be able to go back to Tehran very soon.

From a UK perspective – and I will use 1980 as a benchmark, more than 70% of electricity was generated by coal, and the energy industry perspective was that the future would be what they called CoNucCo – coal, nuclear and conservation or what we now call efficiency. The first North Sea gas had only come on stream in 1968 and the last homes were converted to natural gas from towns gas only in 1976. Much of industry still used coal or oil boilers. What I call the energy establishment, the CEGB, the Department of Energy as it was then, British Gas, the National Coal Board, were all monolithic, public entities and they decided, or at least they thought they decided, what the energy future was going to be. Back then the official forecasts has energy use growing in line with the economy and a relentless expansion of big, centralized energy.

At the same time a few ‘crazy people’ suggested that the future could be different and there was much talk of ‘alternative energy’ like wind and solar.

In the late 1970s in the US Amory Lovins wrote a very famous paper called ‘Soft Energy Paths’ which promoted renewables and efficiency and said that US energy use may not grow at all in the time period up to 2025 if we went down the ‘soft’ path. Here in the UK Gerald Leach and his team wrote ‘A low energy future for the UK’ which basically said the same for the UK. Leach’s low energy strategy for the UK said that by 2025 the UK economy could grow by 300%, which by the way it did, but energy use could go down. Bear in mind the official forecast said energy use would nearly double and fairly soon after that there was a plan to build 83 GW of new nuclear power stations, more than the current capacity of the grid.

Leach’s study was widely rubbished and the most polite thing that the energy establishment experts said about it was that it was ‘optimistic’. Amory Lovins was also pilloried by the US energy establishment.

Well let me tell what happened to those crazy, impossible scenarios. In the UK the economy did grow by almost exactly the amount forecast but energy use did not increase, it went down by 12%. In the US total energy use in 2023 was less than Amory Lovins estimated in his soft energy path!

So it may surprise you but we are actually living in what was regarded as a totally impossible, optimistic, crazy, it will never happen, low energy future. Now some of that it is true is due to changes in the mix of the economy, more services and less manufacturing, but when you factor those variables in we are still in a low energy future.

1980 was a landmark year for the solar industry – it was the year when US company ARCO was the largest producer of solar panels and they made 1 MW in a year, 1 MW in a year. There is 50 MW of solar plants within a 15 mile radius of here so 1 MW is nothing by today’s standards. Today the largest manufacturer, Tongwei Solar, has a capacity of 150 GW of cells and 90 GW of modules – 100,000x bigger than the biggest manufacturer in 1980.

Even by 1990/91, when I helped catalyse some of the earliest wind farms in the UK, the wind industry was tiny – you couldn’t really call it an industry, more a collection of enthusiasts. We held meetings of the whole industry in very small rooms and the largest wind turbine was 400 kW and most were 250 kW. Today the wind industry has 450 companies and employs 45,000 people and the largest off-shore turbines are 15 MW, and now we are seeing 25 MW turbines coming out – 60x bigger than those early turbines. If you had shown us those numbers in 1990/91 even the most visionary of us would not have believed them – and the energy establishment would have laughed at them.

What does this historical perspective tell you and what can it teach us about our views of the future today? It tells me that official forecasts and naysayers are usually wrong.

Today we hear a lot of people say ‘net zero is impossible’, we hear a lot of people say ‘EVs don’t work’ or ‘sales have faltered’, and we hear a lot of people – including the government – say that the future is building more nuclear reactors including that mythical beast the Small Modular Reactor. We also still hear some people say ‘the sun doesn’t shine all the time’ – like nobody knew that before.

We also hear a lot of people say ‘despite all the investment in renewables they only represent a small percentage of energy use’. This is what is known as the primary energy myth – we are comparing generation by renewables to primary energy and completely ignoring that in thermal power stations we throw away 2/3rd of the fuel energy that goes in, and in internal combustion engine cars we throw 80% of the fuel away as heat. Once we electrify you eliminate all of that waste – all of that gas, oil and coal being burnt for nothing and polluting the air, as well emitting carbon dioxide.

Yes – of course there are problems and challenges – not enough electric vehicle chargers, grid connection problems etc – but remember this is a transition. There are bound to be problems as we change out our entire infrastructure and change our electricity markets. Also we should also remember that energy transitions do take a long time – this one may be quicker than any previous energy transition but I think 40 years into it we are about half-way through.

People forget about the power of incumbents in trying to stop or delay change – nearly every day when we see stories in the press criticizing net zero or EVs. Remember incumbents always do everything they can do, legal and sometimes illegal, to stop the disruptive innovators and most of those negative stories are made up by the fossil fuel incumbents.

Of course incumbents resisting change is nothing new. In the mid-19th century, the stagecoach and particularly locomotive industries found themselves facing the looming spectre of the automobile’s disruptive potential. They were afraid the car would replace them. So, they worked hard to convince the government to make strict laws, like the 1865 Red Flag Act. This restricted the speed of horse-less vehicles to 2 mph in towns & 4 mph in the country. The Act also required three drivers for each vehicle – two to travel in the vehicle and one to walk ahead carrying a red flag. There were similar laws passed in the US as well.

Here in the UK the Red Flag Act was finally repealed on 14 November 1896, when the Locomotives on Highways Act scrapped the flag requirement and raised the speed limit to 14 mph. The London to Brighton run of veteran cars is held every year to commemorate the repeal of the law and is always held in November.

Now we are seeing a lot of lobbying from fossil fuel incumbents. In the US several states have passed or are trying to pass anti-renewable energy laws while Trump rants on about ‘windmills’. Meanwhile one of those states, Texas, has installed more renewables and batteries than any other state and it doesn’t look that is going to stop anytime soon – so we are seeing the old energy money and their paid-for politicians fighting the new energy money and their paid-for politicians.

Incumbents can delay change – but they never stop it in the end. The drivers of change are too strong and there are three drivers of the energy transition:

– Sustainability: which is not sustainable because people won’t pay more for green
– Economics: now we are in a phase where solar is the cheapest form of electricity
– Energy security: at a macro level and a micro-level

At different times some drivers have been more powerful than others, and some like economics have been negative, but right now for the first time all three forces are pulling in the same direction, and on-top of that the finance industry is being proactive and shifting capital towards the energy transition and decarbonization. The drivers, particularly economics, are unstoppable.

When thinking about the future people also forget about the power of S-curves. S-curves are incredible – things seem to change really slowly and then suddenly they take off. The diffusion of all technologies follow S-curves and now finally we are seeing that with solar, and batteries are not far behind. S-curves are in five phases:

– Solution search
– Proof of concept
– Early adopters
– System integration
– Market expansion

We are just moving out of early adopters into system integration which means you haven’t seen anything yet, rapid growth – particularly of solar and batteries – is only really getting going. In the words of the classic 1974 Bachman Turner Overdrive song – ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet’. The trends are clear.

We are seeing record installations of solar and batteries and increasing sales of EVs. Not just in China but globally and in the UK. In 2024 the world installed nearly 600 GW of solar installed in the world – 600,000x the output of the biggest PV factory in 1980 and equivalent to the peak output of 600 nuclear power stations. For comparison the global nuclear industry added 7 GW in 2024, about 1% of the capacity. In 2023 battery energy storage systems tripled and are expected to grow at 21% a year up to 2030.

In 2024 EV sales globally grew by 25%. At the end of 2024, the electric car fleet had reached almost 58 million, about 4% of the total passenger car fleet and more than triple the total electric car fleet in 2021. Notably, the global stock of electric cars saved over 1 million barrels per day of oil consumption in 2024. In countries with a high percentage of EVs like Norway and China we are already seeing oil consumption drop.

The transition is accelerating as solar and battery prices continue to fall. In the next stage of the transition the focus will be on electrification and distributed energy, small scale, close to the point of use energy systems.

The famous science fiction writer, Arthur C Clarke once said that ideas go through 3 phases:

– it will never work
– It might work
– I told you it would work all along

With solar we are now in phase 3 with only a few holdouts still saying things like ‘the sun doesn’t always shine’.

The future will be abundant, cheap solar and batteries everywhere in a distributed and flexible energy system, with more power in the hands of the consumer, or rather prosumer as they will be both producers and consumers, than ever before.

So what will some of the consequences of these changes be? Well they certainly include cleaner air, reduced emissions, reduced oil consumption and lower energy prices. But there will also be political changes, globally and locally. Energy, particularly electricity is associated with big centralized power – there are always close links between energy and power, and political power.

Back in the 1980s we talked a lot about ‘petrostates’ – those countries whose economies depended heavily on the production of oil such as Saudi Arabia and others in the Middle East. Now we are seeing the emergence of the first ‘electrostate’ – China. With the shift in power and energy flows there is a shift of political power. The shift towards all consumers, buildings and industry and even cars, becoming both producers as well as consumers of power and ancillary services will shake up politics in ways that haven’t really been thought about yet. Abundant, clean and cheap power will allow us to do new things, to create new industries, clean up the environment, and produce more high-quality lower cost food.

I am planning on sticking around to see the rest of this transition, it is just getting really interesting.

The incredible Ukrainian attacks on Russian military forces deep inside Russia reminded me of the old axiom that Armies prepare to fight their last war, rather than their next war. Ukraine is clearly fighting the current and next war, rather than the last one and drones are the weapon of choice.

Designers and engineers of energy systems for buildings and industry could also be said to be fighting the last war rather than the current or next one. In recent months we have seen several examples of this. Some of this behaviour is for understandable reasons such as the effect of standards which have been put in place for good reasons, particularly human safety; some of it is due to incumbents using their market position and marketing muscle to continue to sell their solution, even when it is no longer the right solution for the customer; some is due to silo thinking rather than system thinking; and some is due to human nature, people tend to carry on doing what they have done before.

Many organisations are genuinely committed to decarbonising their energy system by replacing gas used for heating and/or process by electricity. With our rapidly decarbonising electricity system the carbon emission reduction benefits are clear, and electrification brings other benefits such as reduced maintenance, improved safety, and reduced local air pollution. What it often doesn’t do though, at least in the UK, is bring a financial benefit, or at least a sufficient financial benefit to make it investable given normal corporate investment criteria for non-core business. With heat pumps being one of the preferred solutions for electrifying heating systems the ratio of the cost of electricity to that of gas – the ‘spark spread’ – is critical, and with electricity prices being 3 or 4 times gas prices, even with heat pumps running at an assumed Seasonal Coefficient of Performance of 3 to 4, means investing in them will lead to increased, or at best similar, energy costs. In addition there is the increase in power capacity needed which can lead to a need to upgrade the connections, resulting in yet more capital cost. This lack of financial viability and capacity constraints often stops investment.

The problem we see here is there is still too much thinking about the sub-system of heating as opposed to the whole energy system. We know that the electricity system is rapidly decarbonising, the UK government’s ambition to have ‘clean power by 2030’ is, according to the National Energy System Operator, challenging but achievable. Even if it is not quite achieved by 2030 the direction of travel is clear. Alongside the decarbonisation we are also seeing decentralisation and digitisation of the electricity system and much higher need for flexibility, flexibility that can come from batteries and smart control of loads of all sorts including heat pumps.

Given the evolving nature of the electricity grid it is necessary now for anyone designing, engineering or procuring a new electrical system or an upgrade to an existing system, or decarbonisation of heat by replacing gas, needs to design an electrical system that is fit for purpose and can interact with the grid itself to reduce costs and maximise revenue from sales of power and grid services – that is the grid as it will be in 2030 and not the old, uni-directional grid. The old hard, fixed border between the grid and internal power systems of a building or an industrial facility – a border that traditionally only allows one-way traffic – is now porous and open; power, grid services, information and money must be able to flow in both directions between the grid and the ‘prosumer’.

What does this mean in practice? With solar PV now being the cheapest source of power, and so cheap that the old considerations of orientation and angle are less important as economic drivers, the starting point is to maximise self-generation. That means use roofs, walls, car ports, fences and even balconies as solar generators. Then use batteries to store energy and maximise use of solar. Get the biggest connection possible for import and export. Sign up with an aggregator who can maximise revenues from selling power in the wholesale market, as well as revenue from the Balancing Market, the Capacity Market and other ancillary services markets. Also look to see whether your system can be extended to other near-by users in a micro-grid, either through private wires or sleeving arrangements.

Our experience is that when you look outside the immediate problem of replacing gas, and start to consider the whole system and the benefits of being fully integrated into the flexible electricity market of the future, investment returns look much better. Smart capital is starting to realise that this approach will design and build the infrastructure of the future, and fund integrated distributed energy infrastructure in energy or net zero as a service.

ep is working with clients, technology providers and sources of capital to design, deliver and finance infrastructure fit for the future. We can help you prepare to fight the next war rather than waste time and resources fighting the last war.

Slava Ukraini

One of the major things that is missing from modern society, and possibly the cause of the plight we find ourselves, both environmentally and politically, is the lack of a compelling and positive vision for the future. This absence is particularly notable in the current geo-political environment. This new book provides such a vision for a positive global future based on abundant and cheap energy from solar, wind and batteries. It is very different, however, to other books on energy futures.

The book starts with a historical survey that sets out the impacts of the transition from a hunter gather society to an agricultural society. At that point we changed to an extractive model of the world which over generations has shaped our mentality, our laws, our institutions and even our bodies. It is that extractive model that is the root cause of many of our problems.

The argument in the book is that we will soon have cheap, effectively free, and abundant energy from solar, wind and batteries – a ‘stellar’ energy system that doesn’t need extractive inputs to operate. The emergence of a stellar energy system produces results that cannot be predicted from the sum of the parts – what the authors call ‘radiance’ which is a super abundance, i.e. over supply, of energy that will enable us to restore the damage caused by the extractive economy on a massive scale. With abundant clean energy anything become possible.

Moving beyond the energy system itself the book looks at the effects of this super abundance on various systems including food production, water and transport, as well as issues of ownership and the wider economy and politics. The need for systems thinking is stressed throughout. The effects of embedding stellar technologies into an extractive system, which is where much of the energy system is now, is described as a chimera. The authors argue that this approach leaves us in danger of ‘snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’. The book finishes with eight guiding principles for the journey towards a stellar economy.

This book is a highly recommended tour de force based on real ‘outside the box’ thinking. As the basis of a positive vision of the future it deserves a wide audience amongst energy professionals, economists, policy makers, and indeed anyone interested in building a better future for the world. My optimist side believes in this vision, my realist side remembers the quote from Arthur C. Clarke, ‘we tend to over-estimate what we can achieve in the short-term, and under-estimate what we can achieve in the long-term’. My practicality says, ‘what can we do today to build this future?’.

Credit: Steven Fawkes