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[Episode #284] – Faster Than Forecast

Sep 29 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 Episode #215 (2024)
Tim Gould, co-head of the World Energy Outlook at the International Energy Agency, on Episode #215 (2024) and Episode #148 (2021)
Nic Fulghum, Senior Analyst at Ember, on Episode #254 (2025)

Geek rating: 4

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[Episode #283] – Transportation Beyond Electrification

Sep 16 2026

Mini Episode

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.

Guest:

Debbie Hopkins is Professor of the Human Geographies of Mobility at the University of Oxford.

When she appeared on Episode #96 – Sustainable Mobility in May 2019, Debbie was Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford. Her position was split between the Sustainable Urban Development program, the Transport Studies Unit, and the School of Geography and the Environment. She was then also a research affiliate of the Centre for Sustainability, University of Otago, New Zealand and Associate Editor of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, and at Oxford she led research into expectations of automation in freight, everyday experiences of UK truckers, and novel methodologies for researching mobile work. That conversation returns in Episode #283 – Transportation Beyond Electrification (2026), with a look at what has happened since.

Debbie has co-edited two books on transitions: Low Carbon Mobility Transitions (Goodfellow) in 2016, and Transitions in Energy Efficiency and Demand (Routledge) in 2018, both of which build upon her research interests across climate change, low-carbon futures and sociotechnical transitions.

On Twitter: @debbiehopkins_
On the Web: Debbie Hopkins’ page at Google Scholar

Geek rating: 2

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[Episode #159] – The Cost of Decarbonization

Nov 10 2021

Mini Episode

Why do the major groups publishing energy forecasts consistently undershoot the progress of energy transition? For decades, public sector agencies, oil industry groups, energy industry consultancies, and even environmental nonprofits have been consistently too pessimistic in their outlooks. So why is it that standard energy forecasting models keep getting transition wrong?

A group of researchers at Oxford University may have an answer to that question with a study they recently published on the future trajectory of the energy transition. The problem, they say, is that standard models don't realistically account for learning curves in manufacturing, and exponential growth in deployment as it relates to transition. Their new approach shows that future cost and deployment curves can be predicted quite accurately for energy transition solutions like solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and hydrogen electrolyzers.

What makes their demonstration particularly exciting isn’t just that they’ve found a better approach to modeling energy transition learning curves; it’s what their model shows: that a rapid energy transition is actually as much as $14 trillion cheaper than not transitioning over the coming decades. In short, these researchers suggest there is no net cost to a sustainable energy transition, and that on the economic merits at least, it’s basically inevitable.

Join us in this episode for a discussion with one of the researchers on the Oxford team, Dr. Matthew Ives. He is an economist and complex systems modeler at Oxford University who is currently researching sensitive intervention points for accelerating progress towards the post-carbon transition. We explore exactly how their modeling was done, exactly where traditional modeling has gone wrong, and what it all means for the energy transition.

Geek rating: 5

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[Episode #96] – Sustainable Mobility

May 29 2019

Mini Episode

Energy transition is happening quickly and disruptively in the transportation sector. But it is generally an open question whether the transition currently at hand is producing socially beneficial results. As we grapple with a sudden influx of new modes of mobility and business models, and contemplate the dawning of an entirely new mobility paradigm, are we just letting technology take us wherever it wants to go, or are we guiding technologies toward sustainable mobility? For that matter, what does sustainable mobility even mean? How can we weigh up all the pros and cons of new mobility modes—not just the social effects like safety and equity, but the environmental impacts, the total impact on the energy system, and the socioeconomic strategies we bring to our urban development and civic planning activities more generally? Can we hedge our bets against sudden and massive dislocations produced by autonomous vehicles? We explore all those questions and more in this episode with a researcher from Oxford University who has studied them deeply.

Geek rating: 2

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