2 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

1. Climate roundup 2025

   We now have a lot of data on the global energy transition, and it does not make sense.

   If you look at technology and deployments it’s going gangbusters. There have been amazing deployments of PV solar (315 GW in China, 655 GW globally), wind (78 GW in China, 150 GW globally) and grid battery storage (66 GW in China, 92 GW globally). Battery prices have fallen by 40%. Over 90% of new generation capacity was renewable. In parallel, electrification – the other blade of the scissors – advanced too, particularly in residential heat pumps. (Estimates are from Google AI, taking the lower number if it’s a range.)

   There have been a number of standout nice surprises. EVs in China passed the psychologically important 50% share of the new car market in December. Australia passed the half-way mark in electric generation in the last quarter of the year. The electric establishment in Pakistan surrendered to a 20 GW Hokusai wave of unplanned and unapproved Chinese solar panels, installed by millions of fed-up Pakistani households and businesses with the help of YouTube DIY videos. A similar wave is building in Africa. Coal generation actually dropped in India, in spite of Modi’s longstanding ties to coal magnates.

   There is a “debate” on social media about all this. If you follow the topic at all, your feed will have hundreds of posts complaining that the sun doesn’t always shine, EV batteries catch fire, and turbine blades can’t be recycled. It’s all phoney. The fossil fuel lobby can hire trolls by the thousand, or seduce useful idiots with propaganda. But it’s a Potemkin movement without votes or money. Opinion polls have shown for years that a large majority support renewables to slow climate change. Outside the closed and fearful fossil lobby, the world’s capitalists have joined them. The number of active coal power station projects in OECD countries is five. Unfortunately, politicians and journalists are social media addicts. How else can you explain the incoherent Dutton plan for Australian energy? Trump’s and MAGA’s hatred of renewables is an extreme version of the same cognitive pathology.

   Whatever the cause, the policy world has been crazily going in the opposite direction to the technology and economics. Never mind the demented Trump, sane and well-intentioned leaders like Mark Carney and Ursula von der Leyen have been retreating from sound climate policy, in response to the rise of right-wing hooligans. It looks as we have to trust the markets and the Chinese Communist Party to impose rationality in the end. This has always worked so well in the past.

   Mercifully, the capitalists are working with the engineers. Hundreds of thousands of them are beavering away to broaden and deepen the river of change. Four items struck my fancy as useful or potential game-changers. In decreasing order of probable adoption:

   – There are active plans in the over-bubbly data centre industry for switching the power supplies to all-DC, avoiding a double conversion of DC from solar panels and wind turbines to AC transmission grids and then back again to DC for the server racks. Operational savings in electricity costs could be of the order of 10%. This looks a very good idea, and requires no new technology, but does call for physical proximity to the generators. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/energy-power-supply/current-debate-will-the-data-center-of-the-future-be-ac-or-dc

   – The head of CATL’s marine department stated in public that his company, the world’s largest and richest maker of batteries, has supplied them to over 900 Chinese vessels (coastal and riverine). Many of these will be hybrids Deployment does not yet extend to large seagoing ships, but he thinks they are coming in a few years, not decades. CATL are already working with Maersk, the major Danish shipowner, on refitting ports for large-scale electric propulsion. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/12/05/catl-expects-oceanic-electric-ships-in-3-years/

   – YASA, a British-based boutique subsidiary of Mercedes, has pushed its axial flow electric motor technology (don’t ask me) to a new record power density of 59 Kw/kg: https://electrek.co/2025/10/22/yasa-record-power-density-axial-flux-motor/ Mercedes’ high-performance skunk works is working on a supercar for rich male idiots with 1 Mw of power, a practically useless ten times the perfectly adequate 100 Kw of my quite nimble Hyundai Kona. Lighter is always better though, especially in aircraft.

   – Korean researchers have built a toy electric motor using windings of carbon nanotubes, from an overabundant raw material rather than constrained copper: https://drivesncontrols.com/lightweight-motor-uses-carbon-nanotubes-instead-of-metal-windings/ We are not likely to run out of copper, but eliminating a possible raw material constraint is always helpful.

   And my pet project of carbon removal refuses to die. Several highly reputed research teams have gone public with a case for starting serious work on this now. It’s not just Grumpy Old Man Wimberley saying this! Cranks policy entrepreneurs are already selling non-trivial volumes of carbon credits from rock weathering to Microsoft and a few other woke Silicon Valley firms. For these buyers, this is just cheap reputational insurance, but it’s real money for the researchers, and funds the critical and expensive step of large and rigorous field trials.

   A closing speculation. The IEA estimates global energy demand at nearly 650 exajoules in 2024, or181,000 Twh, growing at a moderate 2% a year. We can confidently cut this in half from the surefire efficiency gains from full electrification, to 90,000 Twh. Round up to 100,000 Twh for future growth. On the supply side China’s solar industry (to a first approximation, we can ignore other suppliers) has a production capacity close to 1 TW a year. Instal all of it, at a 20% CF, that comes to an incremental annual generation output of 1.72 Twh. Add 150 GW a year of global new wind capacity at a 40% CF, we are up to 2.24 Twh. Deploying all this without a pause, we reach global net zero energy only in 45 years. To shorten the timetable to an acceptable single decade, we need global renewables production to grow fivefold. The growth in solar installations was 12x in the last decade, from 50 GW in 2015 to 600 GW a year in 2024: over twice the needed future rate. This should be doable.

2. Non-news from China

   We now have the official numbers for Q4 2025 and the whole year on the main components of China’s energy transition: https://data.stats.gov.cn/english/easyquery.htm Here are the y.o.y. quarterly changes over 2024, physical units apart from GDP:

   2025 over 2024 ******* Q1 ***** Q2 ***** Q3 ***** Q4 ***** Whole year

   Thermal generation___ – 4.31 % _+ 0.42 %_+ 0.69%___- 0.01%___- 0.78%

   Electricity__________ + 1.58 %_+ 3.16 %_+ 3.71%___+ 4.78%__ + 3.18%

   Coal_______________ + 9.17 %_ + 4.55 %_- 1.53%___- 0.83%___+ 1.53%

   Natural gas _________ + 4.30 %_+ 7.36 %_+ 7.71%___+5.78%___+ 8.30%

   Gasoline___________ – 6.54 %__- 9.17 %_- 5.08%___+2.27%___- 3.43%

   Pig Iron____________ + 1.24 %_ – 6.12 %_+ 0.16%___- 7.74%___- 1.84%

   Cement____________ – 2.47 %__ – 1.64 %_ – 3.29%___- 10.65%__- 7.24%

   GDP at constant prices + 5.4 % __ + 5.2 %___+ 4.8 %__+ 4.5 %___+ 5.0 %

   There is a real if small reduction in electric generation from fossil fuels, mainly coal but also gas. The bulk of the steady increase in demand for electricity is met by renewables. We have not yet seen the start of a sustained fall in coal burning, but given all the other news it’s a sure thing. The one fossil fuel that I still growing is gas, for petrochemicals and industrial processes more than electricity. Large and continuing falls in gasoline, pig iron and cement.

   China’s CO2 emissions have peaked. This is now the CW and you will get the same story from Carbon Brief, Ember, and the IEA. I don’t think I am adding significant value with these tables, so I am stopping here. It’s been educational for me at least.

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