Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
Ombú
A prestige redevelopment in Madrid, designed by the Foster practice for Spanish public works contractor Acciona: https://www.fosterandpartners.com/projects/ombu
Engineered wood is at last taking off as a building material. Mike Barnard has a list of prestige projects here: https://cleantechnica.com/2025/09/06/from-towers-to-turbines-the-most-fascinating-mass-timber-projects-worldwide/
It has many advantages: light weight, shorter construction times, controllability from prefabrication in factories, lower carbon emissions from sequestration on a horizon of a century, superior aesthetics and cultural vibes. Mike O’Hare and I made a very modest contribution to the bandwagon in a blog post in 2015, pointing these out: https://web.archive.org/web/20200926112640/https://www.samefacts.com/build-in-wood-in-2016/ Being right is nice, seeing the horse you bet on actually win is even better. We missed a few things of course. One is the ability to plop a few extra storeys cheaply on top of existing brick-and-concrete buildings:
The niche is established. But will engineered wood ever replace a significant volumes of carbon-intensive steel and concrete? I don’t see why not. It ticks a lot of the right boxes for mass adoption: proven technology in a variety of uses and climates, institutional backing from the large forestry industry, ample supplies of the raw material since paper consumption is falling, large potential for economies of scale, a good fit with modern design software, the attractiveness to developers and investors of predictability and control in design and manufacture. What’s against is cultural inertia, sunk assets, the cheapness of cement absent a carbon tax, and the flimsiness of current regulations to ensure sustainable multi-use forestry. These are all soluble.
A couple of anecdata points to reinforce this conclusion.
The global trade body of cement producers is the World Cement Association. Very unusually it forecasts a large reduction in demand by 2050. https://www.worldcementassociation.org/images/download-selector/Articles/WCA%20Whitepaper.pdf Trade associations are usually biased towards boosterism, so the cement guys must be looking at strong data. Substitution by wood is only one of many factors they have been looking at, but it can’t help.
Another is the client for the Madrid project. Acciona is a hardboiled company even by the standards of the sector. It has a track record of influence peddling: https://www.publico.es/politica/acciona-empresa-centro-investigacion-presuntas-mordidas.html On the other hand, it delivers on the overpriced contracts it wins: the motorways and high-speed rail tracks it builds don’t fall down.
The Ombú project looks uncannily like a cathedral. The original building – housing a power station – reflected the technological optimism of the first Gilded Age, now updated for the second by Norman Foster’s genius. I think of Balliol College in Oxford, founded in 1263 by a Northumbrian warlord as part of a penance imposed to settle an arcane and lengthy dispute with the Bishop of Durham over homage owed, or not, for lands near Sedbergh (as it happens, my birthplace). It seems more probable the idea of supporting scholarship came from the Bishop, the capable royal bureaucrat Walter of Kirkham, than from the quarrelsome magnate. It could have come from his wife/widow Devorgulla, a Scottish aristocrat higher up the pecking order: Perhaps concerned about her obstinate late husband’s chances of bluffing his way through the Pearly Gates, she secured the foundation in 1282 with an endowment and charter. The first Scottish university at St. Andrews was only founded in 1414, so it was Oxford, Cambridge or nothing.
Modern capitalist corporations, like the good widow, also see the need to bid for public and elite sympathy with ostentatious and not too expensive good works. Acciona have costed every euro of their grand temple to sustainability, and decided it’s a good deal. Hypocrisy of this sort is replicable. Let’s have more of it.
Below a summary of a report from Ember on the remarkable things happening with regard to China’s energy transition. The graphs don’t copy over but you can see them by clicking on the links.
John Goss
‘Hi, Sam here. I’d like to share Ember’s latest publication: China’s Energy Transition Review, for which I was a contributing author.
The report contains many interesting data points and perspectives that I’d encourage diving into. You can find the full report here.
Below I include a few key charts and findings.
The result is that many emerging markets are leapfrogging the United States in renewables and electrification:
63% of emerging markets (by energy demand) have higher solar uptake than the US, and 25% of emerging markets have leapfrogged the US in end-use electrification.
In the IEA’s Stated Policies scenario, China’s fossil fuel demand begins falling by 2030. Given China’s track record of exceeding targets – hitting its 1,200 GW solar and wind goal six years early and its EV target of 20% of sales 3 years early – these projections will likely prove conservative. The accelerating momentum of emerging market leapfrogging only reinforces this outlook.
Find the full report here. We’ll also have more to come on China’s role in the wider electrotech revolution in our annual slide deck, published next Tuesday 16th September.
© 2025 Kingsmill Bond
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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SMR update
Mike Barnard reports on a credible new study on SMRs, throwing cold water on their promoters’ fanciful projections of low costs. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/09/10/small-modular-reactors-and-the-big-questions-of-cost-waste/
An angle new to me is that SMRs will generate far more waste than current big nuke designs, and new types of waste to be managed. One of the co-authors of the study, Allison Macfarlane, is a former chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission: not exactly some hippie ranting in a garage.
Anna Funder has written on past inequities; the clumsy brutality of authoritarian regimes and the casual cruelty of patriarchy. In this article Anna Funder explores the criminality of social media;
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/10/tech-companies-are-stealing-our-books-music-and-films-for-ai-its-brazen-theft-and-must-be-stopped
Unbelieved good news on the solar boom
“Comes silent, flooding in, the main” – Arthur Hugh Clough
Hilarious charts showing that even the most gung-ho forecasters systematically underestimate the fall in costs and growth in volumes of solar pv energy: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/09/12/us-studies-show-2050-cost-forecasts-for-solar-wind-and-batteries-far-too-high/
The founder of Longi, currently the world’s leading pv manufacturer, thinks that perovskite tandem modules can reach 44% efficiency by 2050, allowing costs to keep falling. Longi do not yet sell any modules using this technology, as there are unresolved issues of durability, but it’s a very risky bet that the massive efforts by multiple large Chinese firms to crack these will fail. Current lab tandem cells are up to 34% efficiency, well above the Shockley-Queisser limit of 30% for plain silicon and the lab cell record of 28.7%.
BTW, the similar trajectory of battery costs means that the cost of firmed solar electricity will follow a similar curve to abundance, as I wrote earlier. Just how much wind generation and pumped hydro storage will be needed, with costs falling but not as fast, is a mildly interesting problem in system optimisation, specific to each large market.
The new building method sounds interesting. I hope it is fire resistant too.
Great news about solar power. Thanks!!
James Wimberley,
Cheap solar panels are a necessary but not sufficient condition for gathering and efficiently utilising abundant solar energy. Australia’s electricity policies are so irrational and our infrastructure so un-adapted to solar that much of our nation’s current solar energy is being wasted or “curtailed”.
This 2024 article suggests 25% is wasted or curtailed.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-08/renewable-energy-wasted-as-australia-greens/104321770
My local and personal experience in 2025 indicated (before my last inverter blew out and my panels were taken off the roof) that 50% of my total power was being curtailed: not being fed to the local grid because the local grid was “over-voltaged” on sunny days. This power is totally wasted. It cannot be fed to the house as the solar inverter isolates from the grid and will then feed neither grid nor house under these conditions. Like most people, I do not have a storage battery yet. The energy providers won’t install power storage. They expect consumers to do it piecemeal.
I am also not making solar power now as my solar panels were recently declared non-compliant due to incorrect installation 13 years ago. I posted this sad tale before on this blog. I won’t repeat it here.
It is very hard now to get any honest, competent trades in Australia who won’t price gouge to replace/fix anything. Believe me, I have had multiple experiences of this recently as my home has reached the age where a number of things need maintenance or replacement.
It means nothing to the consumer on the ground in Australia that China is making cheaper solar panels. Everything else is a complete mess here. I would speculate this applies to all neoliberalised Western countries. Cheap goods from China mean nothing when the rest of the country and all its infrastructure systems have been neoliberalised into complete inefficiency and when price gouging by incompetent, dishonest tradies is rampant.
This is the state of Australia, and as I say, I suspect it is the state of every neoliberalised Western nation.
Cheap panels from China or anywhere mean nothing on their own. Since Western neoliberalised nations are incapable of meeting all the other requirements, the energy transition is failing on the ground. Headlines in glossy promo and industry magazines are not telling the real story. The real story is that the transition is an inefficient. low-functioning mess. I wonder when the people with their heads in the techno-clouds will realise this and see what is really happening on the ground.
There is no abundance that neoliberalism cannot ruin. I think we need to remember that.
Correction to my post above. The ABC article suggested that 25% or a little more of the solar energy more was wasted at peak. The overall current waste was less than 10% according to the article.
My personal experience was that my new inverter was clearly wasting 50% of daily production (going by eye looking at the badly saw-toothed area under the graph with crashes to zero production and slow recovery from that). My local area must be heavily over-invested in rooftop solar power and heavily under-invested in grid capability / battery capability to take solar power.
Nevertheless, I see our total suite of policies in this arena trending towards worse and worse outcomes for consumers and for sustainability. Our tradesperson crisis (short supply, dishonest, grossly incompetent, price-gouging) will also severely hamper Australia in this arena and trend eventually to infrastructure collapse on both sides of the consumer power board.
Yes, I predict things are turning that bad. Yeah, panels from China, whoopee, eventually we will be making slum shanty towns out of them. That’s about all a neoliberalised nation will be capable of.
Finally, if people think I am exaggerating about the dire state of the trades in Australia then here is a Google AI summary. My experience accords with this.
“Complaints about Australian tradesmen have increased significantly. A 20% surge reported in South Australia in one financial year, driven by factors like unlicensed work, shoddy workmanship, and project delays. This surge is connected to underlying issues in the construction sector, such as a severe shortage of skilled trades, rising costs, supply chain disruptions, and an aging workforce, which strain the industry’s capacity and lead to more pressure on both builders and consumers.”
“Reasons for the Rise in Complaints:
Project Delays:
A significant shortage of skilled tradespeople means projects take longer to complete, which can frustrate consumers and lead to complaints.
Shoddy Workmanship:
The pressure to complete jobs quickly due to labor shortages and other issues can result in work that doesn’t meet quality standards.
Unlicensed Operations:
Some tradesmen are working illegally or beyond the scope of their licenses, raising safety and quality concerns.
Underlying Industry Pressures
Aging Workforce:
A substantial portion of the current construction workforce is over 45, and there is a perception problem with the industry, as fewer young people see construction as a viable career.
Supply Chain and Cost Issues:
Rising input prices for building materials and ongoing supply chain and logistics problems add further pressure to the industry, impacting project timelines and costs.
Focus on Infrastructure:
A significant portion of the construction industry’s activity has shifted to large-scale infrastructure projects, contributing to fewer resources being available for residential building.” – Quote from Google AI.
This situation is a total wicked problem, cluster-disaster. You see how I avoided swearing. Even if all laws and policies were changed right now to the best possible ones (eschewing all neoliberalism of course) this situation would take a decade or more likely two decades to rectify. The problems are so deeply entrenched and the lead times for correcting systemic and structural are so long. In fact, nothing is being done to correct any of this. Expect the infrastructure and building situation in Australia to go from bad to worse to disastrous. There is not even any political will to tackle this.
Many don’t care yet because they haven’t become part of one of the demographics which are getting crunched by this set of problems. They will inevitably get crunched too and then belatedly they will care. It will probably be completely too late to save the situation by then.
I am just letting off angry steam. I know nothing will ever change for the better now in highly neoliberalised countries like Australia. I have completely given up hope and I am slowly learning to do without hope. I haven’t quite made that transition. I am reducing blogging overall but today is an outbreak I admit. I never blog anywhere else any more and I don’t do social media. When I disappear completely you will know I have learned to live quietly without hope.
Thanks everyone for useful discussions and info
No doubt, I am being noisy and obstreperous about the promise of solar power these days. No doubt, I am testing people’s patience. I will endeavour to re-silence myself after this post.
I am completely convinced of the worthwhile outcomes of solar power to date, in technical and energy efficiency terms. I am completely convinced of the further promise and further efficiency possible from solar power.
What I am not convinced of is that our society and our (still global) neoliberal economy can or will deliver this promise to people in an efficient or equitable way or an environmentally saving way. Energy policy will continue to remain a completely inefficient and inequitable mess, in Australia at least.
Solar power was and is a delivered good with more technical development in the offing plus an environmental boon. However, having solar power on a domestic resident-owner property in Australia has turned from a worthwhile and largely trouble-free good into one huge headache. In addition, the return on capital, for the prosumer, has been torpedoed by inefficiencies and incapacities in the grid. This is leaving aside the issue of subsidies for prosumers.
What I mean above is that if your system can only be productive half the time (as in my case if my old, retroactively non-compliant panels were even still on my roof) then the return value on the capital investment is halved. These shutdowns are caused by grid overvoltage in the sunniest periods and the automatic internal shutdown of a not-smart-enough inverter, without battery backup. A shutdown inverter cannot feed the grid or the house. Your entire investment is sitting there wasting 50% of its potential production. This costs you. It also costs the environment.
I suspect this loss of potential production is not distributed evenly across customers but rather distributed haphazardly and inequitably. I won’t go too far into the technical reasons for this. I think I can understand the basics, though. I know or suspect all of these issues may be factors;
(a) your local grid may go into over-voltage more often than the average for most localities;
(b) people with 3-phase power may gain a feed-in “front of the queue” advantage;
(c) commercial and business enterprises very possibly are advantaged over domestic prosumers in various ways;
(d) legacy, completely non-smart inverters may advantage their possessors as they do not shut down when they should. This shunts the losses to people with newer, smarter but still not smart-enough inverters and/or systems.
Full disclosure, I was probably benefiting from (d), if it’s real, before my old inverter bowed out with a loud thump. Grid overvoltage possibly helped it bow out which some may see as poetic justice and others might see as another inefficiency in the system. Overvoltage “pressure”, especially regular overvoltage, can can break, damage or reduce the working life of more than just your inverter. The statutory overvoltage limit, even it can be technically observed at all times, may well still cause some reduction in the working life of your electrical appliances. I feel pretty sure the regulatory limit is set for the convenience and profit of the power generators and providers and not with the interests of customers at heart. I mean provided that customers are not attributably killed by over-voltage events. That could cause a bit of a kerfuffle.
My wife wants us to reinstall solar power and a smart inverter, at new cost. She is probably right, logically and rationally. The chances are it will still be a little better financially for us. It could still help the environment a little bit too if the manifest idiocies and inefficiencies of our nation’s entire energy system do not entirely obviate such value.
For myself, I am seriously fed up with the frustrating and time-consuming problems that that having and maintaining renewable energy now ential for at least some prosumers. The savings have become risible and the headaches seem endless. It should not have been this way. It need not have been this way. But we can trust neoliberalism and managerialism to ruin the best promises of any technology and to always ruin any good chances for saving the climate and environment.
I think I have had my final “dark epiphany” on this and other matters. AI does a decent job of the definition of dark epiphany… by summarising human expressions of the concept of course.
“A dark epiphany is a sudden realization or profound understanding that reveals humanity’s fundamental insignificance, cosmic purposelessness, or inherent corruption, often leading to despair, surrender, or a nauseating awareness of one’s true self. While a traditional epiphany is a joyful, illuminating discovery, a dark epiphany uncovers a disturbing or bleak truth, as seen in existentialist literature or religious narratives…” – Google AI.