10 years ago today I published my first blog post, and it’s interesting that I’m still talking about this exact topic – the physics of the gas and electricity markets. Last week I was in Parliament giving one of my training courses for MPs and Peers to a group of about half a dozen Peers and it’s the physics where their knowledge is most lacking (and which is why I am offering the training).
Each of these sessions has had a similar impact with the audience realising that some of the narratives around the energy transition may be naïve, particularly in the light of last year’s total power system outage in Iberia.
In its first year, my blog also morphed from a blog into a consulting business. In the past 10 years I have worked with suppliers, generators, trading companies, regulated utilities, small local businesses, large multi-nationals, think tanks, investment firms and regulators, across three continents. I have written a lot of reports, most of which have been for internal use but some of which have been made available to the public.
I remain a sole trader and my client work continues to come from word of mouth or people reading my blog, and more recently my reports, social media content and the many podcasts and YouTube videos in which I have appeared in the past year or so. While my blog remains my shop window, and a means of engaging with industry colleagues, last year I launched a YouTube channel aimed at the general public to help non-energy professionals better understand the industry.
I have received two death threats, one rather feeble attempt to silence me with litigation, and countless messages of support, both from industry insiders and ordinary people who take the trouble to fill out the contact form on my website in order to contact me. I have tens of thousands of followers and subscribers across various platforms and millions of people have seen my content. I have just returned from an amazing trip to speak at a conference in Namibia. Next month I’m off to Spain. In the past 10 years I have been invited to speak in Guernsey, the Netherlands, Canada and France as well as here in the UK.
I could not have imagined this when I hit publish on that first blog a decade ago. I was struggling with my health – a challenge which continues – and was expecting to take a 6 month sabbatical before finding a new job similar to the one I left. In many ways I’m an accidental consultant since I never intended to pursue this line of work, it just happened – about 4 months into my sabbatical my first client reached out having read my blog and offered me work, and it went from there. I ended up doing several projects for that client and have enjoyed repeat business with others as well.
I am very grateful for all the support I have received over the past 10 years: the clients who have put their faith in me, without any financial backing or administrative support behind me; the regular contributors to my blog whose thoughtful comments have raised it from being just another voice to a community of engineers debating issues of real importance to our evolving energy systems; and the many people who have given me their time to share ideas and information over the years. And to my family which has been with me all the way.
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What is rather less uplifting is that many of the subjects I covered in the first year of my blog are still relevant today: the issues with intermittency, the risks of relying on interconnector imports, and the problems with the European Pressurised Water Reactor – Hinkley Point C was approved despite the litany of issues at Flamanville and Olkiluoto. I also wrote about wireless charging which has taken off and building-integrated PV which hasn’t.
My second ever blog addressed some of the challenges of the energy transition. Although in the early days I was still working through my thinking, the themes were there:
“Wind and solar power are by their nature intermittent, and while their production can be curtailed if the system is over-supplied, they are not able to deliver additional power in the absence of wind and sun. This means that not only are renewables largely unable to support grid stability, but the variations in output undermine the ability of the grid to be maintained in a narrow frequency band. Wind and solar are also not sited in the same way as traditional power stations. New grid infrastructure is required to bring offshore wind, and plant in remote locations, to the sources of demand.”
Across much of the West energy policy has been drifting away from first principles, driven by policymakers who naively think that a grid designed for alternating current will work just fine with direct current, often because they simply lack knowledge of underlying engineering challenges. The underlying physics of power systems: dispatchability, inertia, voltage control, energy density, and the simple requirement that supply must match demand at all times hasn’t changed. But policy frameworks increasingly behave as though these constraints are secondary, or can be engineered away through ambition and targets; that new technologies will provide endless get-out-of-jail-free cards.
Germany’s Energiewende is perhaps the clearest example. After two decades and hundreds of billions of euros of investment, it has delivered a system with some of the highest electricity prices in Europe, while emissions reductions have been slower than expected and heavily dependent on factors outside the core design such as coal displacement by gas, and more recently demand destruction through de-industrialisation. The decision to exit nuclear while expanding intermittent renewables created a structural reliance on fossil backup and imports, illustrating the core problem: you can build large volumes of low-carbon generation, but without firm capacity and system stability, you don’t necessarily achieve proportionate emissions reductions.
Similar tensions are visible elsewhere. In the UK, Ed Miliband’s rhetoric around “leading the world” on clean power prioritises symbolic leadership over system resilience and cost discipline, made worse by the fact that not only is nobody following us and we’re increasingly seen as a cautionary tale. Targets for rapid decarbonisation of the power sector sit alongside shrinking dispatchable capacity, increasing reliance on imports, and a growing need for balancing actions.
The electricity system still depends on gas for reliability, while oil and gas remain essential to many areas of the economy including industry, transport and heating. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband insists his Clean Power 2030 plan is the solution to “getting off gas” yet the only sector that has a clear electrification target – domestic heating – will still require gas for decades. It will take 47 years to fit heat pumps in every home at the target installation rate, and in any case, we’re falling far short of meeting the target. Miliband has no plan to secure the cheap, reliable supplies of gas we will need for those 47 years.
In Australia, the rapid expansion of renewables has exposed challenges around grid stability and transmission, while Canada’s Clean Electricity Strategy will require huge amounts of copper, yet its last remaining copper smelter faces closure due to local environmental regulations: copper is essential for Canada’s energy policy but it’s considered too dirty to produce in Canada. A rescue package is under consideration but the environmental regulations are being delayed rather than removed.
In the United States, the picture is more fragmented but reflects the same underlying divide. Under President Trump and his Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, the emphasis has been on energy abundance, security, and the continued role of hydrocarbons, explicitly pushing back against what they see as unrealistic decarbonisation timelines. That approach carries its own risks, particularly on pollution, but it is at least grounded in a recognition of physical constraints and economic trade-offs.
“Fifty years ago, correctly counting the data, 85% of the globe’s energy came from hydrocarbons, and in 2023, the last full year of data, counted correctly, 85% of global energy came from hydrocarbons. We’ve had over that 50-year period, a little over 1% compound annual growth rate from oil, 2% compound annual growth rate of coal and 3% compound annual growth rate of natural gas. The world simply runs on hydrocarbons, and for most of their uses we don’t have replacements. But we need to thoughtfully and reasonably look at what energy sources can add to what we get from hydrocarbons and make this pie even bigger,”
– Chris Wright speaking at the 2025 ARC conference
Unfortunately this pragmatic approach is not supported across the US. In California, the Benicia oil refinery will cease refining operations and become an import terminal for gasoline. The state is closing a major refinery that produces gasoline in the state with the highest petrol prices in the country, replacing it with a terminal that will act as a receiving base for imported gasoline. California has permanently and drastically reduced its critical domestic energy production capacity, making it more dependent on imports. California was once such a large oil producer that it did not expect to ever need imports, and so no oil pipelines connect it to any other oil-producing region of the US.
We’re seeing an increasing divide between those who stubbornly cling to unrealistic net zero ambitions and those that want a more pragmatic approach that prioritises affordability and energy security. The Iberian blackout cost 11 lives and another 165 excess deaths were associated with the incident, while deindustrialisation is accelerating across the same countries whose net zero policies have pushed energy prices to record highs.
Here in the UK the political battle lines have been drawn with Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens on one side, and the Conservatives and Reform on the other, both of which have committed to repealing the Climate Change Act and removing the obligation to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The Conservatives argue that 2050 is simply the wrong date while Reform describes the entire concept as “stupid”.
Meanwhile the public is increasingly tired of expensive energy and the wider inflation that comes with it. It is also increasingly suspicious of policies that ignore obviously sensible solutions – Miliband is growing more isolated in his refusal to allow greater exploitation of the UK’s domestic oil and gas resources, favouring more expensive and more carbon-intensive emissions.
Unfortunately, things are likely to get worse before they get better. I can only hope that my work plays some part in bringing more sanity to energy policy and helps to avoid some of the risks heading our way if we don’t change course.
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“Belief is a force. It is a force stronger than any other,”
– Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
Kathryn, you are doing a fantastic job, the realisation of the absuditoes of current energy policies is spreading. Not least, thanks to you. Keep it up.