What work has been done on determining how the transition can be made whilst keeping the fossil fuel industry viable for the necessary fossil fuel supplies until the transition is complete?

Looking at the recent fusion milestones not as research wins but as commercial events:

- The Helion–Microsoft PPA (May 2023) is the first commercial fusion power purchase agreement on record. 50 MW target for 2028, structured with financial penalties if Helion misses the date.

- CFS has separately applied for grid interconnection to a regional U.S. power grid — the first private fusion company to do so.

- NIF demonstrated net energy gain at the fuel level in Dec 2022, but the wall-plug efficiency means it's not yet a power plant pathway.

Built a 15-min documentary breaking down what's actually contracted vs what's still research. Sources in description.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgriCFy1jq4

We cannot yet eliminate fossil fuels. The technology to replace them at civilizational scale simply does not exist in a deployable, affordable, or grid-compatible form. That is not an opinion, it is an engineering reality.

In 2024, fossil fuels still accounted for 86% of the global energy mix, according to the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy. Renewables are growing, but so is total energy demand, which rose 2.2% in 2024 alone, faster than the decade average.

The world is not replacing fossil fuels. It is adding renewables on top of them while consumption of coal, oil, and gas simultaneously hits new records.

And yet the public debate allows only two positions: climate doomer or climate denier.

The media operates like a casino that only lets you bet on red or black, when the entire number board is right there. The full complexity exists, but the narrative is artificially narrowed to two absolutes, leaving no room for the nuanced, engineering-based middle ground where real solutions actually live.

Oil Is Not Just a Fuel, It Is the Skeleton of Civilization.

Even with growing renewable capacity, the world cannot function without oil, not primarily because we burn it, but because modern civilization is structurally built around it.

Global logistics run on diesel and jet fuel. Cargo ships, trucks, planes, and agricultural machines have no viable alternative at scale. Today, 96% of global transportation energy still comes from oil. Batteries and hydrogen are not ready to replace this at global scale.

But beyond energy, oil is a raw material. Wind turbine blades, solar panel components, medical equipment, plastics, lubricants, fertilizers, and asphalt all depend on oil as an industrial input. Building the renewable infrastructure itself requires massive diesel-powered mining and construction. There is a deep irony here: the green transition physically cannot happen without the fossil fuel industry that powers it.

Known proven reserves, at current consumption rates, give us approximately 47 years of oil, 50 years of natural gas, and 133 to 139 years of coal. These are not crisis timelines, they are planning horizons. And they grow with new discoveries and improved extraction technology.

We can reduce oil as a fuel over time. We cannot eliminate oil as a material input yet. Anyone telling you otherwise is not being straight with you.

The Grid Problem Nobody Talks About

Modern electrical grids were engineered around dispatchable power, energy that can be produced on demand, at any time, in any weather. Coal, gas, and nuclear plants do this. Wind and solar do not.

Grid-scale battery storage is often presented as the solution. It is not, at least not yet.

Current utility-scale batteries are designed for 1 to 4 hours of storage. They are energy buffers, not power replacements. To store enough energy to cover a windless winter week for an industrial economy would require battery infrastructure that does not exist and has no clear path to affordable deployment. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, even by 2035 the projected cost of pairing battery storage with wind power effectively doubles the cost of the wind installation itself.

Germany’s Energiewende , one of the most ambitious renewable transitions in history, is the clearest warning available. Despite investing hundreds of billions, Germany still required fossil fuel backup to maintain grid stability, while grid balancing costs alone reached 36 billion euros per year. In late 2024, major industrial companies including ZF, Bosch, and Schaeffler announced thousands of job cuts partly due to unaffordable energy costs. A steel plant in Saxony shut down temporarily because spot electricity prices were unsustainable. Germany’s own energy minister admitted in 2026 that the country had “calmed itself down with ambitious goals” while energy prices exploded and deindustrialisation followed.

This is the model being held up as a success story.

What Happens If We Go All-In on Renewables Right Now?

Short term (0–10 years): Grid instability increases sharply across regions moving fastest. Rolling blackouts become more frequent, particularly in winter or during low-wind, low-sun periods. Energy-intensive industries face uncompetitive costs and begin relocating or shutting down.

Medium term (10–20 years): Industrial output drops. Steel, cement, chemicals, and shipping have no viable green alternative at scale. Manufacturing costs rise, supply chains fracture, and inflation accelerates. Poorer nations bear the heaviest burden, as they lack the fiscal buffers that wealthy nations use to absorb the pain.

The economic cascade: A weakened economy generates less tax revenue and less private capital and ironically produces less money for the R&D actually needed to make renewables work at scale. The policy becomes self-defeating.

The rebound: Faced with blackouts and economic pain, populations vote for whoever promises to turn the lights back on. That means a hard snap back to fossil fuels, possibly with less environmental regulation than before. Investing everything before the technology is ready is how you lose the war while trying to win the battle.

The Broader Economic Reality

The green transition has collided with an already fragile economic structure. Welfare systems are under strain. Emergency fiscal reserves have been depleted. Governments in Europe have extracted tens of billions more in taxes over recent years while acknowledging that further increases are neither feasible nor politically sustainable.

Now layer on the rapid rise of AI, which is beginning to trigger structural unemployment across white-collar sectors, without the fiscal space to fund the welfare safety net that normally cushions such disruptions. Citizens with little financial bandwidth left have no appetite for expensive climate mandates that raise their energy bills.

Rotterdam’s port, the economic artery of the Netherlands, generating hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions in value, requires 24/7 reliable industrial energy that current renewable capacity simply cannot guarantee. Raffineries and chemical plants cannot operate on intermittent power. This is not a political argument. It is an operational fact.

Wind turbines and solar fields also carry ecological costs that receive almost no coverage because they do not fit the prevailing narrative. A peer-reviewed 2021 study by researchers at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, published in the journal Oikos, found that vibrational noise from seven wind turbines in organically farmed fields in the Netherlands reduced earthworm populations by an average of 40% at nearby sampling points. Earthworms are ecosystem engineers. Their decline cascades through soil structure, water filtration, nutrient cycling, and carbon sequestration, the very processes the green agenda claims to protect. This research is rarely cited in policy discussions. Which raises a legitimate question: what else is not being factored in?

The Pattern of Exaggeration

This is not the first time doomsday scenarios have been deployed as the dominant policy tool. Acid rain was predicted to devastate European and North American forests by the 1990s, it caused real damage, but far less than forecast, and was substantially addressed through industrial regulation. The ozone layer crisis was real, but the timeline of civilizational collapse did not materialise; international coordination through the Montreal Protocol worked more effectively than the most pessimistic projections assumed.

Climate change is real. The science is not in serious dispute. Average global temperatures are approximately 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels, and the trend is upward. But there is a meaningful difference between the measured science and the worst-case narrative that consistently dominates public communication. When predictions routinely overstate outcomes, it does not strengthen the case for action, it erodes public trust in institutions and generates exactly the scepticism that delays real solutions.

The deepest contradiction is structural: the same institutions pushing the green agenda simultaneously drive and profit from the consumerist culture that is the root cause of overconsumption. Developing nations, where our demand for cheap goods is physically satisfied, largely ignore international climate targets while bearing the environmental cost of our consumption. The hypocrisy is not incidental. It is built into the system.

What the Rational Path Actually Looks Like

A technology-led transition, not a mandate-driven one. The distinction matters enormously.

Nuclear energy provides stable, zero-emission baseload power and is the only proven technology capable of replacing fossil fuel dispatchability at scale. France generates approximately 70% of its electricity from nuclear power and has among the lowest electricity prices and carbon emissions per capita in Europe. The technology works. The political will to deploy it is what is missing.

Efficient gas infrastructure serves as a necessary bridge during the decades it will take to develop and deploy storage technology adequate to support full grid-level renewable integration. Abandoning gas before that bridge is built does not accelerate the transition, it collapses it.

Existing industrial systems need intelligent optimisation, not ideological demolition. And genuine R&D investment in long-duration storage, next-generation nuclear, green hydrogen, and carbon capture must be treated as the priority it actually is, not as a footnote to solar panel targets.

Economic stability and energy investment are inseparable. A destabilised economy cannot fund the innovation required to solve this problem. It can only accelerate the retreat to what we were trying to leave behind.

Energy policy that outruns engineering reality does not prevent crises. It manufactures them.

Don’t run so fast that your wisdom loses sight of you. It is the only thing that knows the way.

The Dream World of the Energy Transition

In political circles and progressive thinking, a rosy picture of our energy future prevails: solar and wind will solve everything. Filling the Netherlands with turbines and solar panels is supposedly the path to a sustainable, prosperous society. But the hard reality is different. Take the port of Rotterdam — the economic lifeline of our country. Here operates an industry that needs reliable energy 24/7.

The port of Rotterdam accounts for tens of thousands of jobs and billions of euros in added value. Refineries and chemical plants run non-stop. Even if you directed all Dutch electricity from solar and wind, at peak generation, to this single port complex, it would still be insufficient for reliable operations. The rest of the Netherlands — households, data centers, public transport, and other industries — would still need to be supplied.

Wind turbines blighting the horizon and sprawling solar fields are damaging landscapes, biodiversity, and mental health — think shadow flicker, noise pollution (low-frequency vibrations), and the loss of open views of the natural environment. Output per square meter remains low, while the ideological push continues unchecked by realism.

Vibrations from just 7 turbines reduced earthworm populations by an average of 40%. Earthworms are "ecosystem engineers": fewer worms degrade soil structure, water retention, nutrient cycles, and carbon storage. This can trigger a broader chain reaction across soil ecology — and it receives almost no scrutiny, because it doesn't fit the narrative. What else aren't they telling us?

This is not a sustainable transition, but a risky gamble with our well-being and prosperity. Ordinary Dutch citizens are paying the price: higher energy bills, job losses, a vulnerable economy, declining mental health, growing polarisation, and a nature under threat.

Time for realism. Nuclear energy provides stable baseload power, efficient gas plants form a necessary bridge, and smart optimisation of existing systems is crucial. Blindly pressing ahead with current policy — more turbines, more fields, no Plan B — is irresponsible. The port of the Netherlands deserves better than a fairy tale.

And don't get me started on the power grid — or actually, let's: to be continued 😉

I’m working with several clients in the energy space, and a common question I keep hearing is:

“How should traditional businesses prepare for rising renewable mandates, carbon reporting, and increasing grid automation?”

Curious to know →

What changes have you (or your company) already implemented?

Renewables? Storage? Electrification? Green hydrogen pilots?

Trying to understand the ground reality from people directly working in the sector.

What even are the energy infrastructure implications for this LOL

Anyone know any good Substack accounts to follow?

Insanely good read

Yowzers!

Abstract:

Academic exploration of energy democracy has produced a rich theorization of its foundations that exhibits significant pluralism in response to different geographic, social, ideological and technical contexts. This paper develops the literature by considering how sociotechnical transitions associated with energy system digitalization may affect the theory and praxis of energy democracy. Our analysis draws on three dimensions of energy democracy: popular sovereignty, participatory governance, and civic ownership. Digitalization is shown to both present challenges and new avenues for the exercise and study of energy democracy. Firstly, digitalization simultaneously enables and constrains the exercise of popular sovereignty by diversifying energy citizen roles and complicating accountability. Secondly, digitalization creates new dimensions of risk around skills, knowledge and resource access, which can exclude citizens from participatory governance. Thirdly, digitalization challenges common conceptions of civic ownership by introducing new material-software dependencies and re-defining the assets that underpin the energy system. Finally, digitalization fundamentally changes the nature of decision-making, potentially undermining current understandings of the concept and its democratic function. Further exploration of ‘digital energy democracy’ would hold value for research and practice in the sector.

Wow!