The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder

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 Episode #264, in which we heard how the end of apartheid precipitated reform of the country’s energy systems. The second part was Episode #276, 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. South Africa has enough wind and solar resources and land to generate at least three times as much power 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. 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. 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.

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 Episode 264, in which we heard how the end of apartheid precipitated reform of the country’s energy systems. 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. 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 — the South Africa Wholesale Electricity Market, or SAWEM — opening the door for renewables to compete with coal. At the same time, there is also an enormous and growing informal supply in the form of distributed solar — 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. 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. 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.

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 Episode #272, has sent import costs soaring. World leaders are now confronting the risks of fossil fuel dependence as never before. 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 350.org‘s count, more than $150 billion has already moved from ordinary households into the balance sheets of oil and gas companies. A new report from 350.org, Out of Pocket: How Delaying Global Fossil Fuel Phase Out is Draining Households and Economies, puts hard numbers on the price of delaying the energy transition. In today’s conversation, we welcome the lead author, Clémence Dubois, Global Campaign Manager at 350.org, to share its findings. Clémence 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 — because for them, delay is no longer an option.

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. 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. These are just a few of the important findings in Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026. 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 Episode #254 reviewing the 2025 edition of this report, which became our most popular episode of the year, and which we re-released without paywall in Episode #266. 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 Episode #272, 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.

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. 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 €80/MWh—that’s a full system cost, including fuel-based backup, for about US 8.7¢/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. But beyond 2030—well within the lifetime of any new power generation system built today—solar 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. 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 “Solar and batteries can power the world.” If you doubt the conclusions, you can run the model and test the assumptions yourself. 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 Episode #188 with Paul Denholm of NREL, and hear Tom’s case for methanol as a surprisingly practical backup fuel.

The attacks on Iran by US and Israel have touched off a regional conflict that has resulted in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil and LNG transits, and is doing severe, ongoing damage to oil and gas infrastructure throughout the Persian Gulf. We are now in a new global energy crisis. IEA coordinated the largest release ever of oil from strategic reserves to calm the oil market, but traders shrugged it off and oil prices kept climbing, because a physical disruption at this scale is totally unprecedented. Even so, veteran oil traders and journalists have warned that the world is still not recognizing the depth of the actual peril it’s in. IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol called this crisis “the greatest global energy security threat in history” and said, “I believe the world has not yet well understood the depth of the energy security challenge we are facing.” IEA also admonished governments to take steps to conserve fuel, including urging their citizens to drive more slowly, work from home, take public transport and car sharing, avoid air travel, and switch to electric cooking. The last time IEA called for such wide-ranging demand reduction was in the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo. The consequences are already cascading well beyond oil: Fertilizer prices have surged 25 to 40 percent, and a similar increase in the price of diesel will flow through to essentially everything, causing “fossilflation.” In response, governments across Asia have begun curbing consumption: Bangladesh is shutting universities early to save power, Thailand and Vietnam are pushing civil servants to work from home, and Myanmar has imposed fuel rationing. And that’s just the beginning. To help us understand this rapidly-worsening reality, we are joined by Rory Johnston, one of the most widely cited independent oil market analysts, founder of the Commodity Context newsletter, and host of the Oil Ground Up podcast. Johnston, who typically avoids alarmist price calls, says $200 a barrel minimum is now on the table. We discuss why the world’s emergency supply tools aren’t working, where oil prices could go from here, and why this crisis has thrown the world into uncharted territory. It could take the world years to recover from this…but in that interim, it’s likely to accelerate the energy transition. To help everyone cut through the fog of war and disinformation, and understand what is happening and how it will affect them, we are publishing this episode without a paywall. So please share it widely.

China’s total CO2 emissions went flat and slowly started declining almost two years ago, but you probably wouldn’t know it from reading the news about how its pipeline of coal power plant projects surged to a record high in 2025. Similarly, recent data shows that China’s coal power output fell by 1% in 2025, even as it built more coal plants than it had in a decade. These kinds of conundrums are typical for China, with its complex interaction of economic forces and top-down state planning. But once you understand what’s driving them, it all makes sense—just not a Western economic kind of sense. To help us untangle this picture, we welcome back Lauri Myllyvirta, co-founder and lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), who last joined us in Episode #138, all the way back in 2021. We were overdue for an update. In this episode, we dig into this coal conundrum—why China added 78 GW of new coal capacity in 2025, more than India built in an entire decade, even as customers pay $14 billion a year in capacity payments to coal plants that may not even run. We look at the 315 GW of solar and 120 GW of wind China added last year, and how 75 GW of new storage is helping to displace coal power. And we discuss why China’s clean energy investments now make up more than a third of its GDP growth—without them, 2025 growth would have been 3.5% instead of 5%. Although its fleet of coal power plants continues to grow, there is good news here. Because as the largest energy consumer in the world, China’s declining emissions mean emissions are declining globally.

Both the IEA and BNEF now project that current policies put us on track for roughly 2.5°C of warming. Some voices, like Daniel Yergin and Bill Gates, argue we should accept that trajectory and focus only on the technologies that are already winning. But even 2.5°C is still much too high. We can and must do better. To help us take stock of the global energy transition in today’s conversation, we are fortunate to be joined by Lord Adair Turner, co-chair of the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC), headquartered in London. The Commission is a global coalition of major power and industrial companies, investors, environmental NGOs, and experts working on achievable pathways to limit global warming while stimulating economic development and social progress. Lord Turner chaired the UK Climate Change Committee from 2008 to 2012, chairs insurance group Chubb Europe, and is a crossbench (non-partisan) member of the House of Lords. We discuss how the transition is reshaping geopolitics, why the ETC’s forecasts for green hydrogen have been cut roughly in half, and what Europe’s green industrial policy (including its carbon border adjustment mechanism) needs to get right. We explore the roles of China and the UK in mobilizing capital for the developing world, how the UK has achieved a 75% decarbonization of its power sector in just 14 years, and what Turner calls ‘double banking’ — the core challenge of the mid-transition, where we’re paying to build new energy systems while the old ones can’t yet be switched off. Turner makes the case that well below 2°C is still achievable, but only if we return to the climate imperative alongside the technological opportunity.

In the first year of his second term, President Donald Trump waged an all-out war on the energy transition. His administration canceled hundreds of projects created under the Inflation Reduction Act, IIJA, and CHIPS Act, blocked offshore wind farm development, and forced aging fossil-fueled power plants to continue operating after their utility owners planned to shut them down. It weaponized every federal agency from Interior to the Department of Commerce against renewable energy, seized Venezuela’s oil, and pulled the US out of participation in key UN climate bodies. The results have been staggering. Over 22 GW of wind and solar projects have been thwarted or thrown into limbo, and fully half of the country’s planned new power capacity, some 117 GW, is at risk of delay. The Department of Energy has issued “emergency” orders to keep six aging coal and gas plants open, invoking a provision of the Federal Power Act originally written for wartime. None of these federal interventions were requested by a utility, grid operator, or state regulator. Courts have been pushing back hard, calling these actions arbitrary, capricious, unreasonable, and seemingly unjustified. Whether any of these executive actions will survive is the central question. In today’s conversation, we are rejoined by Ari Peskoe, Director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, to walk through dozens of Trump’s energy interventions and assess which ones are likely to hold up against the growing wave of legal challenges being brought against them. As we discuss, the courts are doing a surprisingly effective job of striking down the administration’s illegal maneuvers. But every project delayed or canceled while the cases grind through court is inflicting real damage on the energy transition.

If you want to see the energy transition succeed where you live, you might want to get involved in some local advocacy campaigns, or even become an organizer yourself. But how? The energy and climate movement is overwhelmingly popular. Surveys consistently show broad public support for clean energy. Yet energy transition issues rarely crack the top ten concerns of most voters, and we remain remarkably bad at enacting political consequences when decision-makers ignore us. If being right were enough, energy transitionistas would have won by now. In this episode, Carter Lavin—a climate and transportation activist who has spent 15 years training nonprofits, grassroots groups, businesses, and individuals to win local and state-level campaigns—shares what he’s learned. His new book, If You Want to Win, You’ve Got to Fight – A Guide to Effective Transportation Advocacy, serves as a handbook for anyone who wants to move the needle on policies that support energy transition in their own community. We discuss how to translate your goals into specific campaigns, how to connect with allies who share your values, and how to apply pressure at the right decision points. Carter explains the “inside-outside game” that bridges the gap between wonks who read 500-page regulatory filings and activists who show up at protests. We explore power mapping, coalition building, and why working on multiple campaigns simultaneously makes your movement stronger. If you’re ready to move from watching the energy transition unfold to actively shaping it, this conversation will show you how.

As one of the most energy vulnerable countries on earth, Japan faces a difficult choice: join the petrostates, or the electrostates?

Global carbon emissions from the power sector may be close to peaking thanks to an accelerating energy transition.

Chris returns to Paris to interview co-lead Tim Gould about the new World Energy Outlook 2025 report, and to explore the futures it contemplates.

A history of South Africa’s energy transition in the power sector kicks off a new Energy Transition Show miniseries on the African country.

What is the role of distribution utilities in the energy transition?

What are the key elements to a successful energy transition project where you live?

We review some examples of social, political, and technological approaches to climate change mitigation that should give us reason to be optimistic.

China has far surpassed the West to become the undisputed global leader in the energy transition.

For our 10th anniversary, we reflect on what the past decade of our work has been about and consider what the next ten years might require.

Alaska is deeply entwined with the fossil fuel industry, but its major utilities could transition almost entirely to renewables if there was the political will.

In remote, off-road communities of Alaska, microgrids supplied by renewables aren’t just economic; they’re what keep people alive.

What can the world learn about the potential for the energy transition from the world’s first all-electric farm in New Zealand?

What architectural and construction techniques are best for creating comfortable, healthy, and affordable buildings in Alaska? Part 1 of a miniseries on Alaska.

Global carbon emissions from the power sector may be close to peaking thanks to an accelerating energy transition.

Are biofuels and other forms of bioenergy truly ‘renewable’ and ‘carbon neutral?'

How can a country replace a critical technology like blast furnaces with a low-carbon alternative while preserving national security and jobs?

How will South Australia maintain stability and reliability as it becomes the world’s first gigawatt-scale grid to operate with a 100% renewable energy supply?

Will Russia finally get on board with the energy transition, or will it just white-knuckle its energy exports all the way down to zero?

Dr. Martin Green, the “father of solar cells,” recounts the evolution of modern solar PV cells, and we interview the CEOs of two CSP companies in Australia.

What will it take to make next-generation geothermal energy economically competitive and commercially available all over the world?

Numerous energy innovations in Australia help to integrate DERs, VPPs, microgrids, advanced solar and grid technologies, efficient buildings, and more.

How is the Australian government is working with the grid power sector to plan and execute its transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewables?

How is Great Britain developing a coordinated plan to evolve all of its energy networks toward complete decarbonization?

What makes for good, effective, and enduring green industrial policy?

Heat pumps are a low-cost way to decarbonize space heating. Dr. Richard Lowes explains how to design policies to encourage the adoption of heat pumps.

What are the implications of the IEA’s view that world demand for all fossil fuels will peak and begin a slow decline within the next five years?

In this second part of a miniseries on how the UK is evolving its energy system, we discuss innovations on the electricity grid.

In this first part of a miniseries on how the UK is evolving its energy system, we discuss its world-leading efforts to meet its decarbonization goals.

Why have most economic models consistently underestimated the actual speed of the energy transition?

Europe’s energy transition is still gathering momentum and moving ahead according to European energy expert Jan Rosenow.

Why do governments continue to push nuclear power when it is the most expensive, risky, and slow way to decarbonize the power grid?

What are the specific industrial sectors and processes that produce greenhouse gas emissions, and how can we decarbonize them?

Is China relying on coal to power its growth, or renewables? Are their emissions on track to increase, decrease, or go flat? We review the facts!

Chris travels to Australia and interviews Giles Parkinson, a longtime journalist and observer of the energy transition Down Under.

Is it time to break up the utility monopolies in the US and turn ownership and control of the grid over to the public?

What will it take to make the vision of “smart homes” and smart appliances real?

Why haven’t our climate policies been more effective at stopping carbon emissions, and what kinds of policies would work better?

How is the public EV charging sector evolving, and what is needed to make it more usable and affordable for EV drivers?

What is the full potential for distributed solar power in the US?

What kinds of messages resonate with people and get them interested in taking action on climate and participating in the energy transition?