[{"id":4479,"date":"2026-08-31T13:03:51","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T20:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xenetwork.org\/ets\/?post_type=xen_episodes&p=4479"},"modified":"2026-08-31T13:03:51","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T20:03:51","slug":"episode-282-regulatory-moats-around-transmission","status":"publish","type":"xen_episodes","link":"https:\/\/xenetwork.org\/ets\/episodes\/episode-282-regulatory-moats-around-transmission\/","title":{"rendered":"[Episode #282] \u2013 Regulatory Moats Around Transmission"},"content":{"rendered":"

The energy transition calls for more electrification. As transportation, heating, industry, and now power demand from data centers all crowd the interconnection queues, the US needs more transmission than it has built in generations. Even energy transition skeptics can agree on the wires.<\/p>\n

But agreement on the need for more transmission has never been enough to get lines up and running. In 2019, journalist Russell Gold joined us to tell the story of Michael Skelly, who tried harder than anyone. His company, Clean Line Energy, spent a decade developing five major transmission lines to move wind power from the Midwest to the cities that needed it. His flagship line, the 700-mile Plains & Eastern, was fully permitted and offered the Tennessee Valley Authority twenty years of wind power at $18.50 per megawatt-hour, a price even the cheapest coal can't match. But economics aside, TVA walked away and not one of the five lines got built. Gold's book Superpower<\/em> explains why engineering or economics weren't able to overcome the rules written state by state that build \"regulatory moats\" around the incumbents and keep the outsiders out.<\/p>\n

Seven years since then, and those moats are where the race to tackle growing power demand is backing up. Recently ERCOT froze approvals of new data-center connections while the state audits an interconnection queue that has swelled to roughly 474 gigawatts of requested power capacity, more than five times the all-time peak power demand on the Texas grid. In Washington, FERC ordered the six regional grid operators it oversees to explain where the transmission for loads like that will come from. The specific fights are new but the overall mechanism is the one Russell Gold mapped with our host Chris Nelder back in Episode #98<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since then, Grain Belt Express, the line Skelly had to sell on the way down, has grown into an $11 billion, 800-mile project with $1.7 billion in construction contracts signed. And Skelly has a new company working on the first large-scale connection between America's two big grids, a step toward the concept of Superpower<\/em> that would tie the country's balkanized regional grids into one that could more readily support the energy transition's future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Russell Gold on the regulatory moats blocking the transmission needed to move renewable power across state lines, little changed since his 2019 interview.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[710,10,711,251,182,64,232,712,45],"class_list":["post-4479","xen_episodes","type-xen_episodes","status-publish","hentry","category-energy-transition-show-podcasts","tag-clean-line","tag-electricity","tag-michael-skelly","tag-pjm","tag-regulation","tag-solar","tag-transmission","tag-us","tag-wind","xen_guests-russell-gold"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n[Episode #282] \u2013 Regulatory Moats Around Transmission | The Energy Transition Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Russell Gold on the regulatory moats blocking the transmission needed to move renewable power across state lines, little changed since his 2019 interview.\" 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#281] \u2013 Revisiting the Jet Stream"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Millions of Americans are sweltering under heat domes this summer, with temperatures soaring to record highs when weather systems stall. The grid feels the strain of these events too.<\/p>\n<p>This extreme heat often creates a precarious situation that pushes electricity demand to levels never seen before, while forcing generation out of service. But why does summer weather get stuck like this in the first place? And is climate change making it happen more often?<\/p>\n<p>For answers we can look to the North Atlantic jet stream, the high-altitude wind steering weather across North America and Europe. Our guest visualizes this as a ski-slope, where a steep gradient between temperatures keeps the jet racing fast and weather moving. Though, as the Arctic warms faster than the rest of the planet, the slope flattens, slowing the jet stream, which has it meandering in bigger waves. Slow weather becomes stuck weather. Whatever comes along, heat, rain, or drought, can then sit around for longer. Our host Chris Nelder dug into this mechanism in <a href=\"https:\/\/xenetwork.org\/ets\/episodes\/episode-65-climate-science-part-9-jet-stream\/\">Episode #65<\/a>, the ninth part of <a href=\"https:\/\/energytransition.show\/climate-science-miniseries\">our climate science miniseries<\/a>. That was back in 2018, years before \"heat dome\" became a household phrase.<\/p>\n<p>In this conversation, recorded February 2018, Valerie Trouet, of the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, explains how she reconstructed the jet's summer position back to 1725 from the density of tree rings in the British Isles and the Balkans. As the planet warmed, the jet lunged north and south far more often. Jet stream excursions like this have increased sharply since the 1960s, looking nothing like the natural climate variability of the three-century record.<\/p>\n<p>Valerie Trouet shares with us how a five-millimeter core from a living tree reveals the climate's history. She also covers why the jet's slowdown makes more of an impact than how far it swings. Valerie's lab has continued publishing on this topic, and in a 2024 paper in <em>Nature<\/em>, her group took the reconstruction back to 1300 CE, reading jet behavior in seven hundred years of European harvest dates, grain markets, and mortality. Her former postdoc went even longer in a 2025 study tracing hemisphere-wide jet patterns across a full millennium, and so far, their frequency looks essentially unchanged on that extended timescale. Today's episode is one of our lagniappe releases, so the complete original conversation can be freely available for the entire Energy Transition Show audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When the jet stream slows and meanders, summer weather stalls. Tree rings show its excursions increasing sharply since the 1960s as the planet warms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,1145],"tags":[107,211,842,420,418,416,419,417,276],"class_list":["post-4447","xen_episodes","type-xen_episodes","status-publish","hentry","category-energy-transition-show-podcasts","category-free-complete-shows","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-science","tag-cs-mini","tag-cyclone-bomb","tag-drought","tag-jet-stream","tag-polar-vortex","tag-tree-rings","tag-weather","xen_guests-valerie-trouet"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>[Episode #281] \u2013 Revisiting the Jet Stream | The Energy Transition Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When the jet stream slows and meanders, summer weather stalls. Tree rings show its excursions increasing sharply since the 1960s as the planet warms.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/xenetwork.org\/ets\/episodes\/episode-281-revisiting-the-jet-stream\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"[Episode #281] \u2013 Revisiting the Jet Stream | The Energy Transition Show\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When the jet stream slows and meanders, summer weather stalls. 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The report's 75th edition, now presented in partnership with the energy think tank Ember, reveals a year in which demand for every form of energy hit a new record high.<\/p>\n<p>But growing overall demand, even for fossil fuels, doesn't mean the energy transition isn't happening. Renewables grew more than any other form of energy for the first time outside of a recession, with solar power accounting for 72% of the increase. And global electrification reached a tipping point, with electricity demand growing 3%, faster than energy supply overall. China alone added the equivalent of Germany's entire annual electricity consumption in a single year. These are just a few of the indications that the future of global energy use is increasingly electric, even as regional paths differ.<\/p>\n<p>In 2025, rising electricity demand was met entirely by low-carbon sources, with renewables and hydro overtaking coal as the largest source of generation. Fossil generation fell overall, demonstrating that fossil fuels are being substituted rather than supplemented.<\/p>\n<p>Solar and storage are clearly taking the lead in the global energy system, and they're not looking back, as global battery storage capacity grew 66% last year alone. Solar already produces more electricity than gas in major parts of the world, and its lead in power generation will only grow.<\/p>\n<p>In this episode, we are joined by Aditya Lolla, Interim Managing Director at Ember, and Euan Graham, Senior Electricity and Data Analyst at Ember and a lead author of the report, to share the key findings from this new update on all the energy data that matters.<\/p>\n<p>We'll dig into the report's new total energy supply measure, which we explored in <a href=\"https:\/\/energytransition.show\/259\">Episode #259<\/a>. We'll hear how China's road fuel demand is now falling, redefining the assumed long tai<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We review the highlights from the Statistical Review of World Energy 2026, offering the first complete look at global energy data for 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[1349,235,233,719,645,403,532,69,65,93,223,333,64,60,115,232,45],"class_list":["post-4425","xen_episodes","type-xen_episodes","status-publish","hentry","category-energy-transition-show-podcasts","tag-asia","tag-australia","tag-batteries","tag-carbon","tag-curtailment","tag-data","tag-germany","tag-grid","tag-natural-gas","tag-nuclear","tag-oil","tag-renewable-energy","tag-solar","tag-spain","tag-storage","tag-transmission","tag-wind","xen_guests-aditya-lolla","xen_guests-euan-graham"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- 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#279] \u2013 Debottlenecking Europe\u2019s Grid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Right now, Great Britain has more than enough new solar projects waiting to be connected to its distribution grid to meet its 2030 renewable energy target.<\/p>\n<p>Italy and Poland could reach half their 2030 solar targets just by connecting the solar already sitting in their queues.<\/p>\n<p>Across just eight European countries, there's a whopping 375 GW of wind and solar PV projects, and an even larger 455 GW of battery storage projects, just languishing in connection queues. Together, these wind, solar and battery resources are roughly equivalent to the entire generation capacity of those countries.<\/p>\n<p>These are the shocking findings from a new study commissioned by the European climate nonprofit Beyond Fossil Fuels. Its estimates are deliberately conservative: the study values the trapped clean energy projects at around \u20ac100 billion, with the real total almost certainly higher. In this episode, we welcome Tara Connolly, their Programme Lead for Energy Markets and Grids, to share what the report found and learn what can be done about this sad state of affairs.<\/p>\n<p>And the crunch isn't only on the supply side. Data centers are now muscling to the front of the same queues. In Ireland, they already consume half of greater Dublin's electricity, while households' EV chargers, rooftop solar, and home batteries wait behind them.<\/p>\n<p>It will not surprise our longtime listeners at all to learn that unlocking all this mostly comes down to regulation, with many of the fixes already on the books, just not enforced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why is so much wind, solar and battery capacity stuck in connection queues across Europe\u2019s distribution 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#278] \u2013 Enhanced Geothermal Energy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It's taken a very long time to arrive, but next-generation geothermal power is finally becoming a commercial technology. Even though the virtues of geothermal have long been known and appreciated as clean, low-impact, and capable of running continuously, the few conventional geothermal installations in the US operating for decades supply less than half a percent of the nation's electricity. The promise of next-generation, \"enhanced\" geothermal, which we discussed back in <a href=\"https:\/\/energytransition.show\/248\">Episode #248<\/a>, is that it can be used almost anywhere. But business and technical challenges have held it back.<\/p>\n<p>Until recently, that is. Now, several companies have overcome those challenges and are hard at work on new projects in the US and elsewhere, including Fervo Energy's Cape Station project in Utah, which is expected to begin delivering power this year and expand to 500 MW by 2028.<\/p>\n<p>And the resource is significant: According to the IEA, the technical potential for next-generation geothermal wells less than 5 km deep in the United States is greater than 7 terawatts, a number that's more than five times the nation's total existing electricity generation capacity. The US Department of Energy projects that as much as 300 GW of that could be economically deployed by 2050, enough to meet up to 40 percent of anticipated demand growth. Some studies suggest that if new data centers are sited strategically, geothermal could power all of them. And costs are coming down fast. The IEA estimates they could fall by as much as 80 percent, which would make geothermal cost-competitive across the US. All that development would also create or preserve hundreds of thousands of jobs, many using skills that transfer directly from oil and gas extraction and fossil power generation.<\/p>\n<p>To lay out the opportunity, the obstacles, and the state of the art in enhanced geothermal, we are pleased to be joined by Dr. Emily Pope, a senior fellow at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Her report, <em>Drilling Down\u2014What it Will Take to Harness the Potential of Next-Generation Geothermal<\/em>, was published in April and offers a comprehensive review of the sector. So if you gave up on geothermal years ago, this episode will show you what's changed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is enhanced geothermal energy finally ready to be a significant commercial technology?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[190,1061,333],"class_list":["post-4398","xen_episodes","type-xen_episodes","status-publish","hentry","category-energy-transition-show-podcasts","tag-100-renewables","tag-geothermal","tag-renewable-energy","xen_guests-emily-pope"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>[Episode #278] \u2013 Enhanced Geothermal Energy | The Energy Transition Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Is enhanced geothermal energy finally ready to be a significant 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#277] \u2013 Just Transition in South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is the third and final part of our miniseries about South Africa's energy transition, based on Chris' travels there in September and October of 2025. The first part was <a href=\"https:\/\/energytransition.show\/264\">Episode #264<\/a>, in which we heard how the end of apartheid precipitated reform of the country's energy systems. The second part was <a href=\"https:\/\/energytransition.show\/276\">Episode #276<\/a>, where we learned how South Africa is reforming its electricity system from a state-owned monopoly to a free market, and from coal to renewables.<\/p>\n<p>South Africa has enough wind and solar resources and land to generate <em>at least three times as much power<\/em> as its entire annual load, but the country is still locked into its old coal-fired electricity grid. Market reform is the key to unlocking that potential.<\/p>\n<p>In this episode, we'll hear how those reforms can help deliver a just transition for South Africa, the most economically unequal country in the world. Because there, the energy transition isn't only about cheap, clean power; it's also a driver of economic justice. Today, some of the poorest households pay up to three times the grid price for electricity drawn through informal connections, and formalizing that power is a chance to deliver cheaper, fairer access to those who need it most.<\/p>\n<p>We'll also learn how utilities and regulators across sub-Saharan Africa are working to integrate unsanctioned, distributed solar and storage into their grids. In South Africa, roughly 60% of those systems were never reported to the utility, and in Kenya the figure is effectively 100%. The economics are hard to argue with: the $1.7 billion Africa spent on solar panels last year is already meeting more demand than the $20 billion a year it spends on diesel fuel, with more than 85% of it self-financed. That bottom-up adoption is now transforming energy systems not only in South Africa, but across the entire region.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>South Africa\u2019s economic development now depends heavily on leaving behind its coal-fired legacy electricity system and making a \u201cjust transition\u201d to renewables.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,1312],"tags":[21,125,755,751,1333,26,1334,64,754,45],"class_list":["post-4394","xen_episodes","type-xen_episodes","status-publish","hentry","category-energy-transition-show-podcasts","category-south-africa-2025","tag-coal","tag-electricity-grid","tag-eskom","tag-just-transition","tag-reipppp","tag-renewables","tag-sawem","tag-solar","tag-south-africa","tag-wind","xen_guests-joel-nana","xen_guests-josh-dippenaar","xen_guests-kenneth-creamer","xen_guests-lebogang-mulaisi","xen_guests-mark-swilling","xen_guests-megan-davies","xen_guests-megan-euston-brown","xen_guests-wikus-kruger"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>[Episode #277] \u2013 Just Transition in South Africa | The Energy Transition Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"South Africa\u2019s economic development now depends heavily on leaving behind its coal-fired legacy electricity system and making a \u201cjust transition\u201d to renewables.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/xenetwork.org\/ets\/episodes\/episode-277-just-transition-in-south-africa\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"[Episode #277] \u2013 Just Transition in South Africa | The Energy Transition Show\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"South Africa\u2019s economic development now depends heavily on leaving behind its coal-fired legacy electricity system and making a \u201cjust transition\u201d to renewables.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" 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#276] \u2013 Electricity Reform in South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is the second part of a miniseries about South Africa's energy transition, based on Chris' travels there in September and October of 2025. The first part was <a href=\"https:\/\/energytransition.show\/264\">Episode 264<\/a>, in which we heard how the end of apartheid precipitated reform of the country's energy systems.<\/p>\n<p>South Africa is arguably one of the most exciting places in the world to see the energy transition unfolding right now, because after nearly 150 years of relying almost exclusively on coal for its energy, it is finally implementing reforms that will allow its electricity system to integrate more renewables onto its grid.<\/p>\n<p>Eskom, the state-owned monopoly, has owned and controlled the grid for over a century. Its aging coal fleet still provides around 80 percent of the country's electricity, even though solar power is now far cheaper, and it has been able to block new renewable projects because they threatened its coal business. But now Eskom is being broken up into separate units for generation, transmission, and distribution. And the country is launching its first wholesale electricity market \u2014 the South Africa Wholesale Electricity Market, or SAWEM \u2014 opening the door for renewables to compete with coal.<\/p>\n<p>At the same time, there is also an enormous and growing informal supply in the form of distributed solar \u2014 enough to meet a quarter of the country's electricity demand. Many businesses and residents are installing their own solar and battery systems, often without any kind of permission from or notice to the utility. That is simultaneously creating an entirely new and complex sort of electricity system that's hard for utilities to manage, while also making the system far more resilient. In fact, distributed solar batteries are credited with putting an end to the \"load shedding\" blackouts that plagued customers for over 15 years.<\/p>\n<p>Formally and informally, South Africa is rushing headlong from its coal-fired past and into the renewably powered future. Clean generation led by solar surged past 30 percent in late 2025, while coal fell to a record monthly low. South Africa's experiment in restructuring a vertically integrated, coal-dependent grid offers an early look at the politics, economics, and surprises that other markets will face as they take on their own transitions to renewables.<\/p>\n<p>In this episode, we'll be hearing from experts who are closely involved with the electricity reforms in South Africa. In the next episode, we'll see how those reforms play an important role in delivering a just transition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>South Africa is embarking on a major reform of its electricity system to transition from a state-owned monopoly to a free market, and from coal to 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#275] \u2013 The Cost of Delay"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In mid-2026 we're experiencing the largest energy crisis the world has ever faced. The sudden and prolonged disappearance of one-fifth of the global supply of oil and LNG, set in motion by the Iran war we covered in <a href=\"https:\/\/energytransition.show\/272\">Episode #272<\/a>, has sent import costs soaring. World leaders are now confronting the risks of fossil fuel dependence as never before.<\/p>\n<p>The high costs and outright physical shortages of oil and gas are driving inflation across the global economy. But that's not all. The crisis is also weakening currencies in importing economies, deepening their debt, stalling growth, and transferring wealth on an enormous scale. By <a href=\"https:\/\/350.org\/\">350.org<\/a>'s count, more than $150 billion has already moved from ordinary households into the balance sheets of oil and gas companies.<\/p>\n<p>A new report from <a href=\"https:\/\/350.org\/\">350.org<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/350.org\/out-of-pocket-report\/\"><em>Out of Pocket: How Delaying Global Fossil Fuel Phase Out is Draining Households and Economies<\/em><\/a>, puts hard numbers on the price of delaying the energy transition. In today's conversation, we welcome the lead author, Cl\u00e9mence Dubois, Global Campaign Manager at <a href=\"https:\/\/350.org\/\">350.org<\/a>, to share its findings. Cl\u00e9mence explains how the delay imposes opportunity costs, economic and environmental justice costs, and national security risks on importing countries. She makes the case for why this crisis, unlike the six previous oil shocks, might be the final nail in the coffin of the world's dependence on imported oil and gas. And we'll see how many countries are already switching to domestic renewables and electrification \u2014 because for them, delay is no longer an option.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A 350.org report adds up the cost of delaying the energy transition and the benefits of pursuing it, especially for oil and gas importing countries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[107,21,135,705,261,223,26,64,45],"class_list":["post-4390","xen_episodes","type-xen_episodes","status-publish","hentry","category-energy-transition-show-podcasts","tag-climate-change","tag-coal","tag-cost","tag-environmental-justice","tag-gas","tag-oil","tag-renewables","tag-solar","tag-wind","xen_guests-clemence-dubois"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.9 - 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#274] \u2013 Global Electricity Review 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For years, transition skeptics have argued that what's really happening globally is \"energy addition,\" where renewables are piling on top of fossil fuels rather than pushing them aside. The data that's just landing from 2025 finally puts that argument to rest.<\/p>\n<p>For the first time, global electricity generation from fossil fuels fell, not because of a pandemic shutdown, recession, or unusual weather, but simply because renewables grew faster than demand. Power-sector emissions dropped along with it, also a first. Solar recorded the largest single-year increase of any electricity source on record, with the exception of coal's rebound as the world re-opened after 2020. And renewable generation surpassed coal in the modern era for the first time.<\/p>\n<p>These are just a few of the important findings in Ember's <em>Global Electricity Review 2026<\/em>. To unpack what they mean, and what they don't, we welcome back to the program Nicolas Fulghum, Senior Energy and Climate Data Analyst at Ember and one of the report's lead authors. Nic was last on the show in <a href=\"https:\/\/energytransition.show\/254\">Episode #254<\/a> reviewing the 2025 edition of this report, which became our most popular episode of the year, and which we re-released without paywall in <a href=\"https:\/\/energytransition.show\/266\">Episode #266<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In today's show, we'll see how the structural decline in fossil generation, long-anticipated by transitionistas, finally arrived. We'll hear why solar's growth rate refuses to slow even as the technology matures. And we'll explore how the second fossil fuel shock of the decade, this time from the Iran war we covered in <a href=\"https:\/\/energytransition.show\/272\">Episode #272<\/a>, is pushing more countries to accelerate their move off imported fuels. The energy transition isn't coming. It's here, and it's getting more unstoppable every year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2025, renewables generated more electricity globally than fossil fuels for the first time in the modern era, causing power sector emissions to fall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[233,1113,17,21,10,125,22,69,659,26,64,45],"class_list":["post-4387","xen_episodes","type-xen_episodes","status-publish","hentry","category-energy-transition-show-podcasts","tag-batteries","tag-battery-storage","tag-china","tag-coal","tag-electricity","tag-electricity-grid","tag-emissions","tag-grid","tag-india","tag-renewables","tag-solar","tag-wind","xen_guests-nicolas-fulghum"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>[Episode 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#273] \u2013 Solar and Batteries Can Power the World"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the sunniest parts of the world, solar and batteries are already the cheapest way to build new power generation capacity on an unsubsidized full system cost basis, and that cost advantage is expanding quickly.<\/p>\n<p>By the end of this decade, solar and batteries could affordably supply 90% of electricity for most of the world's population at less than \u20ac80\/MWh\u2014that's a full system cost, including fuel-based backup, for about US 8.7\u00a2\/kWh. While this is already cheaper than building a new gas-fired grid, given that European gas prices spiked to ten times their normal level during the 2022 energy crisis and remain volatile today, the gap is only likely to widen.<\/p>\n<p>But beyond 2030\u2014well within the lifetime of any new power generation system built today\u2014solar and batteries will almost certainly be the cheapest, most reliable, and least volatile way to expand a power grid. Doubling down on fossil gas generation under these conditions, as many governments are contemplating, would be a terrible mistake, both economically and geopolitically.<\/p>\n<p>That is the central finding of a model developed by Tom Brown, professor for Digital Transformation in Energy Systems at the Technical University of Berlin. Tom also led the development of the open-source toolbox Python for Power System Analysis (PyPSA), and based this analysis on a blog post titled \"<a href=\"https:\/\/nworbmot.org\/blog\/solar-battery-world.html\">Solar and batteries can power the world<\/a>.\" If you doubt the conclusions, you can run the model and test the assumptions yourself.<\/p>\n<p>In today's episode, we'll dig into how the model works, what happens when you add wind to the mix, and why battery costs could halve again by 2050, making solar-dominated grids dramatically cheaper than anything we can build with gas. We'll also examine the land question and find that powering the world with solar would take just 0.3% of global land, a fraction of what we currently devote to livestock. And we'll revisit how to meet that last 10% of demand, a topic we last explored in <a href=\"https:\/\/energytransitionshow.com\/188\">Episode #188<\/a> with Paul Denholm of NREL, and hear Tom's case for methanol as a surprisingly practical backup fuel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Can solar and batteries power the world cost-effectively? A new model says yes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[233,1113,125,69,881,136,114,404,64],"class_list":["post-4383","xen_episodes","type-xen_episodes","status-publish","hentry","category-energy-transition-show-podcasts","tag-batteries","tag-battery-storage","tag-electricity-grid","tag-grid","tag-iams","tag-lcoe","tag-modeling","tag-seasonal-storage","tag-solar","xen_guests-tom-brown"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>[Episode #273] \u2013 Solar and Batteries Can Power the World | The Energy Transition Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Can solar and batteries power the world cost-effectively? 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