A look back at the last forty years of the energy transition and a look forward to the next forty years

A personal introduction

Having worked on what we now call the energy transition for a long time, and given that you are just starting on your careers in energy, I wanted to give you a longer-term perspective on the energy transition and give some principles which I find useful when looking at what it going on in the world of energy. I’m pleased to see so many students studying sustainable energy as it remains one of the most important subjects there is.

I first studied energy systems, including sustainable energy, here in the late 1970s although of course we didn’t call it sustainable then, we did however talk about energy transitions.

Anyway let’s start with some context and take you back in time to that period. Like many children growing up in the 1960s and 1970s I was obsessed with the space programme and in particular the Apollo programme. I have written quite a lot about this subject and so I won’t dwell on it here, only touch on some of its extensive influence on the world.  In December 1968 the crew of Apollo 8, the first crewed spacecraft to leave earth orbit and orbit the moon, took the famous Earthrise photo. Apollo 8 was an amazing thing to witness, even on fuzzy black and white TV.

Former US Vice President Al Gore credits the Earthrise photo with kick starting the environmental movement which was just beginning back then, and the first Earth Day was organised in 1970.

In the summer of 1969, we had a family holiday in Wales and we visited the Pumped Storage Hydro plant at Ffestiniog. This 360 MW station was the first major Pumped Storage Hydro station in the UK and was effectively a pilot for larger stations that followed. I remember being deeply impressed by the ingenuity and the scale of the engineering involved. If you ever get a chance to visit one do it, a few years ago we visited Cruachan in Scotland which is open to the public.

Another formative experience was the oil crisis of 1973/74 which was a result of the Arab oil producing countries embargoing exports to countries that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur war between Israel, Egypt and Syria.  As well as restricting oil exports the price of oil quadrupled from $3 a barrel to $12 a barrel.  In the US gasoline was rationed, reduced speed limits were introduced, and many energy conservation measures were implemented such as turning the lights off in Times Square in New York, and in some states even banning Christmas lights altogether. The crisis threw the West into a long recession.

Internationally the crisis led to the creation of the International Energy Agency in 1974 with a mandate for international co-operation on the security of oil supplies. In the UK, although we were not subject to the oil embargo, the economy was seriously impacted and the government moved to increase coal consumption which gave the coal miners leverage in wage negotiation. The miners took industrial action which reduced production and to save electricity, which was primarily generated by coal then, the government introduced the three day week. Commercial supply of electricity was limited to three days a week and domestic households were subject to power cuts. I well remember having favourite TV shows interrupted by power cuts and studying by candle light – something that is unimaginable today given our dependence on electrical and electronic devices.

My Birmingham experience

So those formative experiences, and the realisation that being an astronaut probably was not a viable career choice, led me to decide that energy was a problem worth spending a life working on. The University of Birmingham, as is often the case, was ahead of its time and had an inter-disciplinary degree called Science of Resources which included options on either energy or minerals.  I applied, got in and took the energy option.

We studied the engineering behind all kinds of energy technology from fossil fuels, to nuclear, to wind and solar, which were considered ‘alternative’ and distinctly fringe at that time, as well as economics and management, and the context for energy and its impact on society through history. My final year dissertation was on hydrogen as an aviation fuel , which was a serious proposition back then – so when people start talking about hydrogen I sometimes get déjà vu.

In the middle year of my time at Birmingham we had the 1979 oil crisis caused by the Iranian revolution. I spent that summer driving an ice cream van in the USA and the price of ‘gas’ was a constant source of conversation and complaints. Earlier that year we also had the near disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. These events meant that energy technology, energy supply, and energy policy remained high on the political and social agenda.

Following Birmingham I worked for a year and went on to do a PhD at the University of Stirling looking at the potential for energy efficiency in UK industry – and I have spent much of my time since then turning some of that potential into actual results – as well as in buildings and transport

The energy transition

The term energy transition was not widely used back then. One of the first public uses of the term was by US President Jimmy Carter in 1977 in a speech on energy. Of course now we are much more familiar with the term. I prefer to talk about energy transitions, and we have seen the transition from pre-industrial and early industrial energy sources of water power and biomass, to coal – the driver of the industrial revolution and the source of the UK’s global economic and political power in the nineteenth century. I do recommend learning energy history and an excellent source on coal is ‘Black Gold’ by Jeremy Paxman which tells the full story of the British coal mining industry from its early days when sending children down the pits was common, and fatal disasters were frequent.  If you ever get a chance to go down a coal mine like we did during our course at Birmingham, preferably a real one rather than a museum one, do it and you will get a real appreciation of how hard a job it is – even with today’s technology.

The oil age began in 1859 when Colonel Edwin Drake completed the first successful oil well in Titusville Pennsylvania.  Drake’s well was 69 feet deep (20 m) and everyone thought he was crazy until he hit oil. Of course we had exploited naturally occurring oil in places where it came to the surface for centuries, but Drake’s well was the start of oil exploration and drilling, the modern oil and gas industry.  Incidentally the deepest oil well drilled to date has been 31,000 feet (10,000 metres) which is absolutely incredible, whatever you think about the oil industry its technology is incredible.    The oil age really got under way in the 20th century and particularly in WW2 and in the growth phase after the war, from the 1950s to the early 1970s.

The next stage of the transition was natural gas which was discovered in the North Sea in the 1960s and in the late 1960s the UK was converted from towns gas – which was made by coal – to natural gas. Natural gas of course was a great marketing term and it is only now that we are beginning to understand the health effects of burning natural gas in the home. Calling something ‘natural’ does not make it healthy.

Now we are firmly in the transition to renewables with GW scale off-shore wind farms and use of solar power growing rapidly.  Of course here in the UK the wind industry really started in the early 1990s but it was tiny until the 2000s and 2010s. Back at the beginning we could fit the entire UK wind industry in a small meeting room – it now employs 55,000 people and renewables as a whole employs more than 250,000 people

How did we see the energy future back then?

So meanwhile back in 1977 – the year I started at Birmingham there were a few other significant things that happened that year:

• The Star Wars movie came out, (I was not a fan, being into ‘hard’ science fiction)
• Apple Inc was incorporated and launched the Apple IIE micro-computer
• The space shuttle made it first glide test flights, having been released from its Boeing 747 carrier aircraft
• David Bowie released Heroes with its incredible title track
• The Queen had her Silver Jubilee after 25 years on the throne
•   Elvis Presley died
• ‘Annie Hall’ starring Diane Keaton, who just died, and Woody Allen was one of the top movies

So how was the energy future viewed back then?  Essentially the view was dominated by the supply side who saw ever growing energy demand.  A 1980

UK official forecast out by the Department of Energy, as it was then, was that  83 GW of new generating plant would be needed by 2000, (compared to current capacity of c.75 GW). There was little or no attention paid to the demand side, consumers had no choice and took what they were given, and the energy industry was run by the massive, state owned monopolies such as the Central Electricity Generating Board, twelve regional distribution companies, British Gas and of course the National Coal Board.

Looking forward the main scenarios for the future energy system were summarised as CoNucCo:

–        Lots of coal generation – there was a lot of talk about ‘clean coal’ which of course the current US administration is talking up again

–        lots of nuclear generation

–        and some conservation – a term that conflated conservation, (using less energy by doing less e.g. turning thermostats down or not driving on certain days), and energy efficiency, (doing the same, or more, with less energy input)

In a famous, or perhaps infamous, speech President Jimmy Carter spoke about energy efficiency wearing a cardigan, (sweater) which for many years, and perhaps even now influences peoples’ views on energy efficiency and  makes them think it is about doing less rather than doing the same with less energy

Meanwhile, if you looked closely there were a few cracks in the CoNucCo future

A group of Danish teachers in Tvind built a 2 MW wind turbine which basically set the standard design for all modern wind turbines, although of course the technology has improved tremendously. They were considered crackpots by most of the energy establishment.

So what has changed in the last 40 years of the transition?

Well first of all climate change became a thing. In the late 1970s we did mention global warming occasionally but we did certainly did not focus on it – even though the term was first used in 1975. There was still occaisonal talk about ice ages returning.

Here in the UK the energy industry, which had been dominated by the large, centralised, state-run entities like CEGB, British Gas, and the National Coal Board, were all privatised and broken up and competition introduced. Then nearly every other country followed suit to a greater or lesser extent,

Everyone expected energy use to grow pretty much in line with economic growth – but it didn’t.  Here in the UK electricity demand has gone down.  This is actually a good game – ask people if they think electricity demand has gone up or down between 2000 and 2025. Most people will say it has gone up by a lot but in fact it has come down due to the effects of energy efficiency and restructuring of the economy. Surprisingly enough, the future we are living in now, was regarded as a crazy, impossible scenario back in the early 1980s, at least by the energy establishment.

Very significantly, here in the UK we have eliminated coal as a source for generating power – the last UK coal fired power station, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, shut down in 2024 – after 142 years of coal use for generating power in the UK.

Another massive change, which has accelerated in the last few years, and which is more significant than many people have yet realised, has been the huge reductions in the costs of solar, wind and batteries. This has largely come about because of the massive investments in solar and battery manufacturing in China and because like electronics, increased production leads to lower costs.

Solar and batteries are now cost-competitive with fossil fuel sources and solar is the lowest cost way of generating electricity in most markets. The juggernaut of economics is driving massive growth in installations of solar and batteries globally. The fact that solar is the largest capacity source of electricity globally now would have been unimaginable in 1980 when solar was only used in satellites and some remote off-grid applications.

Looking at the future from here

Looking forward the future is undoubtedly electric. In all applications the use of electricity is growing, everything from huge mining dump trucks, to HGV lorries, heating for homes and industrial processes, and even aviation. Of course there will continue to be markets for e-fuels and hydrogen, but many of these will be overtaken by electricity as the performance of batteries continues to improve and their costs continue to fall.

As well as the growth of electricity, electricity markets themselves are changing rapidly. They are going from centralised generation and one-directional flows, to decentralised systems where all consumers can also be producers – ‘prosumers’ – generating both power and valuable grid support services. In academic terms, the electricity market is in transition to a distributed, variable renewable, storage, multi-directional, cross-vector system. I prefer to talk about prosumers and every building becoming a generating station and battery. Recent changes in the electricity market such as Ofgem’s P415 mean that all customers can access and benefit from participation in the energy market as well as all the other markets such as the Capacity Market and the Balancing Mechanism.

Some important principles

I want to close with some important principles to always remember when

when looking at any energy news or development or situation. 

S curves are powerful

The adoption S curve model, first put forward by E M Rogers in 1962 is very useful.  In my course at Birmingham we talked about them but they are still under-appreciated. What seems very slow progress at first can suddenly become very fast.

With solar and Batteries right now it seems that we are just entering the rapid growth phase.

The Gartner Hype Cycle always applies

The Gartner Hype Cycle is always worth remembering. Every technology goes through it. First there is a discovery or technical break-through that gets reported in the press with a story about how it is going to change the world, then investors pile in and everyone is talking about it. Expectations get inflated and then the bubble bursts, leading to the trough of disillusionment. Over time certain applications emerge and there is the slope of enlightenment followed by the plateau of productivity. We saw it in the late 1990s with the internet boom; we saw it with hydrogen which is now rapidly sliding into the tough of disillusionment as more and more projects, often backed with government subsidies, get cancelled as economic reality kicks in; and now of course we are really seeing it in real time with AI and Large Language Models where we are rapidly scaling the upper slopes of the peak of inflated expectations. Expect the bubble to burst in the next 12 to 18 months – my prediction is that a lot of those data centres that are supposed to drive massive energy demand growth will never get built.

Fawkes’s Law 9

Related to the Gartner Hype Cycle is my own Law 9, one of 12 Laws of Energy Efficiency I wrote a while ago: ‘An exciting energy or energy efficiency discovery in the lab somewhere is not the same as a viable technology, which is not the same as a commercial product, which is not the same as a successful product that has meaningful impact in the world.’ Politicians in particular seem to forget this far too often in their quest for the next bright, shiny thing they think will solve the energy problems.

Prediction is hard

As Neils Bohr, the nuclear physicist, supposedly said: ‘Prediction is hard, especially about the future”.  A classic example of this is the continued failure of the energy establishment to forecast the growth of solar. Every year the IEA forecasts solar growth and every time reality far exceed the forecast. Prediction is hard, but especially hard when you are seeped in the status quo.

Incumbents are always going to incumbent

The incumbents, those companies, individuals and institutions who control the current market, whether it is in energy or anything else, are always going to resist change to a system that threatens their income and their positions. They will use mis-information, lobbying and sometimes far worse tactics to protect themselves.  In 1860s the Locomotive Acts, known as the Red Flag Acts, were passed following lobbying by the railway and the horse carriage industries. The biggest effect of this was that all horse-less carriages and road locomotives has to be led by a man waving a red flag. The need for a man carrying a red flag was repealed in 1896 by which time the horse-less carriage or automobile business was growing rapidly with a wide range of internal combustion engine, steam and electric vehicles.

Today we see much evidence of incumbents putting out false information about heat pumps and electric vehicles for instance. Incumbents will always incumbent.

EVs are not new

At the start of the
twentieth century electric vehicles were just as common as internal combustion
engine and steam engine powered vehicles. In 1901 the great inventor, Thomas
Edison, invented a new battery type, nickel-iron, and declared that electric vehicles were the future. He built the equivalent of a giga-factory but despite his
undoubted marketing skills, as well as his prodigious technical skills which
greatly improved the energy density and reliability of the battery, it was not
to be. The business – The Edison Storage Battery Company – carried on making batteries for other applications and was sold to Exide in 1972 who then stopped making nickel-iron batteries in 1975.

Interestingly, a 2021 Nature Communications article reported that Stanford University researches had applied nano-technology to the nickel-iron battery with promising lab results – so perhaps Edison’s technology will make a comeback. 

Edison’s friend and collaborator on electric cars, Henry Ford, once famously said “history is more or less bunk” but history can be helpful for understanding the present. 

The primary energy fallacy

The energy establishment and the fossil fuel proponents often say that ‘renewables cannot replace all the energy we use’. They conveniently ignore the fact that they don’t have to as they are looking at primary energy, the inputs of oil, gas, coal etc., and not the final energy use, what we actually use, which is a lot less than primary energy. Of course people don’t actually want energy at all, they want light, warmth, cold, motion, and sound – alternatively as the great Amory Lovins said more eloquenty: ‘People don’t want energy, they want warm showers, cold beer, comfort, mobility and illumination’.

Power (and energy) are closely linked to political power

There has always been a close linkage between electrical power, (and fuel of course), and political power. This comes from several things, not least the amount of money that the power and energy industries generate, some of which finds it way to politicians, both legally and often illegally. It also come from the time period when national grids were put in place, starting in the 1930s in the UK and the USA and going right through to the 1960s and early 1970s. This was a period when governments controlled the energy industry and a period of large-scale, central planning delivered mega-projects such as the national grid which delivered power to everyone. You can see this attitude reflected in the iconography around power stations, wherever you go, UK, Europe, (particularly in Eastern Europe) and even in the USA. Power stations and power facilities often have sculptures, carving or friezes illustrating the power of man over nature, the benefits electricity produces, and the munificent state bringing power to the people.

As we move from Electrification 1.0, which was driven by large centralised projects ‘giving’ power to the masses in a one directional flow, and move to Electrification 2.0 which will be based on decentralised generation and multi-directional flows of power, the politics of power will change in interesting ways.

Conclusions

Having chosen to work on what we now call the energy transition from the late 1970s, and contributed to some of the changes that have occurred over the last forty years or so, I can say a few things:

–        it has always been interesting and has kept me engaged

–        solving energy problems is a worthwhile purpose in life

–        I have no intention of retiring and hope to see as much of the next forty years of the transition as possible

–        if you stay working in energy as I have, you should have an interesting and fulfilling career

–        I look forward to the changes that you and many others like you around the world will bring